Space-Doppler adaptive processing for radar imaging of moving targets masked by ground clutter

Abstract

Non-cooperative moving targets appear defocused within synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and, in the case of ground targets, the blurring effect because of the uncompensated target motion decreases the radar's detection capabilities. Ground clutter, if sufficiently strong, may also obscure individual scatterers on moving targets resulting in a decreased ability to successfully classify the target. In this study, clutter suppression and inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging are combined to obtain high-resolution images of non-cooperative moving ground targets within SAR images. The clutter suppression technique proposed here is ISAR application oriented and is termed space-Doppler adaptive processing. Results obtained by processing a real dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.