Resolution enhancement for Doppler beam sharpening imaging

Abstract

The efficient scan moving target indication (MTI) mode is implemented in the wide-area ground MTI systems for the purpose of wide-area surveillance. However, because of the scanning movement of the radar antenna, it is difficult to acquire enough coherent pulses in a single azimuth direction in the Doppler beam sharpening (DBS), so the sharpening ratio is greatly limited. To mitigate this problem, a combined super-resolution algorithm with aperture extrapolation for DBS imaging is proposed to enhance the sharpening ratio in this study. In this algorithm, aperture extrapolation technique is utilised to increase the data length in azimuth direction and the amplitude and phase estimation of a sinusoid, which can acquire accurate spectral estimation with much lower side lobes and narrower spectral peaks, is applied to replace the fast Fourier transform to perform the Doppler analysis. In this way, the sharpening ratio in the new algorithm could be enhanced by one time. Experimental results on simulation data and real data verify the effectiveness of the new super-resolution algorithm, and demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can provide sharp and clear scene information with lower side lobes and narrower peaks.