Azimuth Sidelobes Suppression Using Multi-Azimuth Angle Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

Yamin Wang; Wei Yang; Jie Chen; Hui Kuang; Wei Liu; Chunsheng Li

doi:10.3390/s19122764

Azimuth Sidelobes Suppression Using Multi-Azimuth Angle Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

Sensors (Basel). 2019 Jun 19;19(12):2764. doi: 10.3390/s19122764.

Authors

Yamin Wang¹, Wei Yang², Jie Chen³, Hui Kuang⁴, Wei Liu⁵, Chunsheng Li⁶

Affiliations

¹ School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China. [email protected].
² School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China. [email protected].
³ School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China. [email protected].
⁴ School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China. [email protected].
⁵ Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S1 3JD, UK. [email protected].
⁶ School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China. [email protected].

Abstract

A novel method is proposed for azimuth sidelobes suppression using multi-pass squinted (MPS) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. For MPS SAR, the radar observes the scene with different squint angles and heights on each pass. The MPS SAR mode acquisition geometry is given first. Then, 2D signals are focused and the images are registered to the master image. Based on the new signal model, elevation processing and incoherent addition are introduced in detail, which are the main parts for azimuth sidelobes suppression. Moreover, parameter design criteria in incoherent addition are derived for the best performance. With the proposed parameter optimization step, the new method has a prominent azimuth sidelobes suppression effect with a slightly better azimuth resolution, as verified by experimental results on both simulated point targets and TerraSAR-X data.

Keywords: azimuth sidelobes suppression; multi-pass squinted (MPS); synthetic aperture radar (SAR).