Estimating Along-Track Speed of A Ground Moving Target in the Presence Of Acceleration

A method to estimate the along-track speed of an accelerating moving target based on estimating the slope of along-track interferometric (ATI) phase and the Doppler rate of the target phase history is proposed. ATI phase noise appears to be the major stumbling block when estimating a very small ATI phase slope change that corresponds to a target's along-track speed. Because of this problem, the feasibility of the technique cannot be demonstrated using RADARSAT-2 MODEX data. On the other hand, the estimation of the target's Doppler rate can be noticeably improved with the proposed use of the target's ambiguity.