High resolution SAR imaging of ground moving target in dense clutter environments

In dense clutter environments such as cities or mountainous areas, the signal-clutter-ratio (SCR) is low and the clutter has extremely evident dispersing characteristics. It becomes a much more difficult task to detect and image a slow-speed ground moving target for high resolution airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR). In this paper, an approach of refocusing slow-speed ground moving target in dense clutter environments is presented. We prove that after the displaced phased center antenna (DPCA) processing, strong clutters will be effectively suppressed and defocused moving target images will remain. To suppress the clutter, a new adaptive DPCA method is applied. Then, a parameterized method is used to refocus the region of interest (ROI) chip data of the moving target. Compared with existing methods, this parameterized method has obvious higher computational efficiency. The validation results with the real data measured by a high resolution X band SAR system are presented.