High-Resolution SAR-Based Ground Moving Target Imaging With Defocused ROI Data

In a conventional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image, a moving target may be smeared and displaced. Taking direct action on the defocused region of interest (ROI) data from the result of a conventional imaging algorithm, this paper presents an imaging method of the ground moving target in high-resolution SAR. A 2-D equivalent velocity parameter space is built along the azimuth and range directions with the derivation of an exact analytic expression of the ROI. In each pair of equivalent velocity parameters, the Stolt interpolation is used herein to remove the residual phase error. After that, a graph of the ROI complex subimage contrast is produced with respect to the equivalent velocity parameter space. Based on the maximum contrast principle, the desired equivalent velocity is then estimated and applied for deblurring the ROI. Finally, we can achieve the refocused SAR image of the moving target. Different from the conventional approach of moving target autofocusing that requires resynthesizing back to the full data from the cropped ROI data, the proposed method directly operates on the small-sized defocused ROI subimage without any resynthesizing operations. It is helpful for the computational burden reduction, procedure simplification, and clutter interference suppression. The experiments on synthetic and real data are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.