Lei Zhang

In spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), moving targets are almost buried in ground clutter due to the wide clutter Doppler spectrum and the restricted pulse repetition frequency (PRF), which increases the difficulty of moving target detection. Clutter suppression is one of the key issues in the spaceborne SAR moving target indicator operation. In this paper, we describe the clutter suppression principle and analyze the influence of amplitude and phase error on clutter suppression. In the following, a novel dual-channel SAR clutter suppression algorithm is proposed, which is suitable for the Gaofen-3(GF-3) SAR sensor. The proposed algorithm consists of three technique steps, namely adaptive two-dimensional (2D) channel calibration, refined amplitude error correction and refined phase error correction. After channel error is corrected by these procedures, the clutter component, especially a strong clutter component, can be well suppressed. The validity of the proposed algorithm is verified by GF-3 SAR real data which demonstrates the ground moving-target indication (GMTI) capability of GF-3 SAR sensor.

Multi-input multioutput (MIMO) is a novel technique to achieve high-resolution as well as wide swath in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems. Channel imbalance is inevitable in multichannel systems that it declines the imaging quality. Generally, the imbalance cannot be fully compensated by simple internal calibration in a MIMO-SAR system. In this paper, a new algorithm based on raw data is presented to remove the channel phase error. Based on the error source, this approach models the phase error as two parts: the transmit phase error and the receive phase error. The receive phase error is removed using cost function at the azimuth processing stage, whereas the transmit phase error is estimated with correlation. Point target simulations confirm the influence of channel phase error and the validation of the proposed approach. Besides, the performance is also investigated.