Weight windows — An improved approach

Weight windows are an important part of spectral analysis, especially in radar Doppler processing. Presently their study is in a stalemate, accepting the present tradeoff between mainlobe width and sidelobes attenuation as a fait accompli. An exception is Stankwitz et. al. Apodization technique for sidelobe reduction in SAR images. Our paper suggests an improved approach to windowing with performances expected from “Tri-Apodization” but with computational complexity of “Dual Apodization”. The new approach achieves smaller SNR loss than a single low-sidelobes window. Basically the processor performs two FFTs following different windows and chooses the minimum at each output element. The predicted improved performances are confirmed by results from measured radar data.