NOVEL PRE-PROCESSING TECHNIQUES FOR COHERENCE IMPROVING IN ALONG-TRACK DUAL-CHANNEL LOW FREQUENCY SAR

The coherence between the complex image pair from two channels is important for improving the capability of along-track interferometry (ATI) processing in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ground moving target indication (GMTI). The along-track dual-channel low frequency SAR can be easily influenced by not only mismatch errors of the image pair but also the radio frequency interference (RFI). RFI has great impacts on the joint probability density function (PDF) of magnitude and phase in the interferometric image. However, little work has been done to investigate the coherence improvement under RFI. This study develops an algorithm to improve the coherence of the image pair for along-track dual-channel low frequency SAR, which can be used by ATI. After analyzing RFI imaging in detail, it is proposed that the along-track interferometric image in the range frequency and cross-range slow time domain can be used to detect RFI. Median filters are proposed to further suppress RFI. This suppression has the same implementations to the image pair without heavy computation load. Considering RFI suppression and mismatch errors compensation, a pre-processing flow is proposed to achieve high coherence of the interferometric image in low frequency SAR. It is shown that the coherence of the complex image pair can be improved greatly by using this pre-processing flow. The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated with real data acquired by an airborne along-track dual-channel P-band SAR GMTI system.