Detecting moving targets in SAR imagery by focusing

A new method for detecting moving targets in a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image is presented. It involves segmenting a complex-valued SAR image into patches, focusing each patch separately, and measuring the sharpness increase in the focused patch. The algorithm is sensitive to azimuth velocities and is exquisitely sensitive to radial accelerations of the target, allowing it to detect motion in any direction. It is complementary to conventional Doppler-sensing moving target indicators, which can sense only the radial velocity of rapidly moving targets.     

Nonlinear apodization for sidelobe control in SAR imagery

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery often requires sidelobe control, or apodization, via weighting of the frequency domain aperture. This is of particular importance when imaging scenes containing objects such as ships or buildings having very large radar cross sections. Sidelobe improvement using spectral weighting is invariably at the expense of mainlobe resolution presented here is a class of nonlinear operators which significantly reduce sidelobe levels without degrading mainlobe resolution implementation is via sequential nonlinear operations applied to complex-valued (undetected) SAR imagery. SAR imaging is used to motivate the concepts developed in this work. However, these nonlinear apodization techniques have potentially broad and far-ranging applications in antenna design, sonar, digital filtering etc., i.e., whenever data can be represented as the Fourier transform of a finite-aperture signal