Title :
Balancing Target Noise against Thermal NoiseOn the Optimum Beamwidth for Mean Radar Reflectivity Estimation
Author :
Gerbl, Florian ; Biebl, Erwin
Author_Institution :
Tech. Univ. Munchen, Munich
Abstract :
Synthetic aperture radar algorithms provide images consisting of pixels containing information on the reflectivity of the imaged scene at locations corresponding to the pixels. The quality of such an image can be judged by several figures of merit such as azimuth resolution, which is directly influenced by the antenna´s beamwidth. This paper presents a novel figure of merit that also depends on the beamwidth and takes into account thermal receiver noise as well as noise originating from the nature of the target to be imaged. It is shown that the optimum beamwidth in terms of the novel figure of merit strongly depends on the type of object to be imaged and on noise parameters of the imaging system.
Keywords :
antenna radiation patterns; radar imaging; reflectivity; synthetic aperture radar; thermal noise; antenna beamwidth; mean radar reflectivity estimation; synthetic aperture radar algorithms; target noise; thermal noise; Horn antennas; Layout; Noise figure; Noise shaping; Pixel; Radar antennas; Radar imaging; Reflectivity; Signal to noise ratio; Synthetic aperture radar; Synthetic aperture radar; antenna radiation pattern; estimation; radar scattering;
Conference_Titel :
Microwave Symposium, 2007. IEEE/MTT-S International
Conference_Location :
Honolulu, HI
Print_ISBN :
1-4244-0688-9
Electronic_ISBN :
0149-645X
DOI :
10.1109/MWSYM.2007.380385