Suppression of sidelobes and noise in airborne SAR imagery using the Recursive Sidelobe Minimization technique

The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has recently developed the Recursive Side-lobe Minimization (RSM) technique (patent pending). The technique is integrated with a standard back-projection algorithm to form synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images with significant reduction in side-lobes and noise. We have achieved significant improvements in noise reduction by applying the RSM technique to our Ultrawideband (UWB) Synchronous Impulse Reconstruction (SIRE) forward-looking radar. This paper presents the application of the RSM technique using data from a side-looking airborne SAR system from SRI International. We describe the RSM technique, the SAR data processing, compare the baseline and RSM SAR images, and quantify the image quality in term of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the statistical distribution of the image pixels to show that significant improvement achieved using the RSM technique.