A Fast Along-Track Velocity Estimation Method for Moving Targets in Monostatic SAR Image

Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has attracted special interests in ocean applications, but the fast estimation of ship velocity remains a big problem. A fast along-track velocity estimation method for moving targets is proposed in this manuscript. In our method, several defocusing filters are applied to the imaging result firstly. Exploiting the differences of the maximum of the filtered images, the along-track velocity of all moving targets can be estimated. Subsequently, instead of iterative estimation, a Look-Up-Table (LUT) technique is used to accelerate the estimation to satisfy the real-time processing demand. Finally, proposed method has been shown effective on both simulated and real TerraSAR - X dataset, demonstrating capabilities of accurately estimating along-track velocity.