Performance Evaluation of a GLRT Moving Target Detector for TerraSAR-X Along-Track Interferometric Data

The availability of high-resolution along-track interferometric synthetic aperture radar (ATI-SAR) data with large coverage, such as TerraSAR-X (TSX) data, motivates spaceborne ground moving target detection as an attractive alternative to conventional traffic data acquisition. In this paper, a performance analysis of ground moving targets detection by means of ATI-SAR systems and using a statistical approach is carried out on both simulated and real data. A Gaussian clutter model and a deterministic target response have been assumed. The receiver operating characteristic for the likelihood ratio test (LRT), which can be assumed as a reference best performance case, has been expressed in closed form and has been related to the deflection values, which can be exploited for assessing the improvements in the detection probability with a constant false-alarm rate. For practical applications, the performance of a generalized LRT (GLRT) has been investigated. The analysis carried out on simulated data revealed that the detection results achieved using a GLRT based on a deterministic target model are comparable with those obtained using a GLRT based on a Gaussian target model and are not significantly worse than the theoretical performance of the LRT. Finally, ground moving target detection results on TSX real data are showed.