Multi-Channel Calibration for Airborne Post-Doppler Space-Time Adaptive Processing

This paper presents a fast and efficient multi-channel calibration algorithm for along-track systems, which in particular is evaluated for the post-Doppler space-time adaptive processing (PD STAP) technique. The calibration algorithm corrects the phase and magnitude offsets among the receiving channels, estimates and compensates the Doppler centroid variation caused by atmospheric turbulences by using the attitude angles of the antenna array. Important parameters and offsets are estimated directly from the radar range-compressed data. The proposed algorithm is compared with the state-of-the-art Digital Channel Balancing technique based on real multi-channel X-band data acquired by the DLR's airborne system F-SAR. The experimental results are shown and discussed in the frame of traffic monitoring applications.