STAP/GMTI analysis using SAR data from simulated scenarios

The surveillance of ground areas is one of the essential tasks for modern manned and autonomous flying platforms. Especially a SAR/GMTI sensor is essential because itpsilas all weather capability, but often demands large size antennas which must be designed under aerodynamic aspects with compromises regarding the ideal SAR processing need. The customerpsilas exigency for long-term observation capabilities requires furthermore the employment of automatic recognition systems. Both aspects require a SAR sensor design to platform, to performance and not at least to costs. This paper presents a performance assessment tool for both aspects, i.e. the influence of antenna imperfectnesspsilas to the (coherent & multi-channel) SAR data and also the impact to the target recognition capability. The tool combines the EADS SAR simulation program ldquoPIRDISrdquo which is able to deal with nearly arbitrary antenna patterns and produces coherent multi-channel signals in the range/Doppler domain, with a new ldquoground moving target indicationrdquo (GMTI) module working in the post-Doppler modus. The plot extractor regards only that information available also in an operational system and delivers (moving) target alarms (and also false alarm candidates, depending on scenarios and radar parameters). The results are compared with the ground truth known from the scenario generation in terms of accuracy of localisation, probability of detection and false alarm sensitivity.