Moving Targets Detection Capacities Improvement in Multichannel SAR Framework

When using multichannel synthetic aperture radar (MSAR) to perform moving target detection, the coherence between the received signals is closely linked to the detection capacities of the system. In airborne MSAR context, because of the platform movement, the antenna patterns, as well as the phase shifts between the channels, evolve in different ways during the integration time. In this paper, these dissimilarities are shown to cause a degradation of coherence, and hence of detection capacities. A method to enhance the coherence is then developed. This method is based on the estimation of the steering vector. It is applied on two sets of real data, and the obtained results validate the method.