Imaging and Relocation for Extended Ground Moving Targets in Multichannel SAR-GMTI Systems

In a multichannel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, because of the target uncooperative motion, a ground moving target (GMT) is usually smeared, distorted, and shifted in an SAR image. In this article, a novel approach for multichannel SAR-GMT indication (GMTI) processing is proposed. The main innovations of this method are that a GMT can be well refocused and relocated since the target high-order Doppler parameters can be precisely estimated based on a high-order polynomial phase signal (PPS) model, and the target statistical amplitude and phase information is jointly applied to improve the radial velocity estimation robustness. Compared with the current SAR-GMTI algorithms, the improvements of this method over the existing methods are: 1) the topography interferometric phase can be effectively compensated by applying an adaptive 2-D spectrum filtering technique via iterative processing; 2) a GMT can be well imaged since the target Doppler chirp rate and the quadratic chirp rate can be well estimated via the 2-D coherent integration in the time–frequency plane; and 3) a GMT can be precisely relocated into its original position by applying the generalized amplitude and phase weighting technique. Real-measured SAR data processing results are presented to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.