SAR ground moving target indication based on relative residue of DPCA processing

For modern synthetic aperture radar (SAR), it has much more urgent demands on ground moving target indication (GMTI), which includes not only the point moving targets like cars, truck or tanks but also the distributed moving targets like river or ocean surfaces. Among the existing GMTI methods, displaced phase center antenna (DPCA) can effectively cancel the strong ground clutter and has been widely used. However, its detection performance is closely related to the target’s signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) as well as radial velocity, and it cannot effectively detect the weak large-sized river surfaces in strong ground clutter due to their low SCR caused by specular scattering. This paper proposes a novel method called relative residue of DPCA (RR-DPCA), which jointly utilizes the DPCA cancellation outputs and the multi-look images to improve the detection performance of weak river surfaces. Furthermore, based on the statistics analysis of the RR-DPCA outputs on the homogenous background, the cell average (CA) method can be well applied for subsequent constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection. The proposed RR-DPCA method can well detect the point moving targets and distributed moving targets simultaneously. Finally, the results of both simulated and real data are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SAR/GMTI method.