In-Swath and Out-of-Swath Radio Frequency Interference Mitigation for Elevation Multichannel SAR Data

The electromagnetic environment is becoming complex as the usable spectrum will be allocated for more services. As a result of this situation synthetic aperture radar (SAR) missions are frequently perturbed by radio frequency interference (RFI) that jeopardizes their scientific observations all over the world. The state-of-the-art multichannel SAR has anti-RFI capability since it’s capable of digitally modulating the antenna pattern (AP) in postprocessing, thereby steering the null toward the angle of arrival (AOA) of the RFI in the spatial domain. However, the AOA of RFI is space-variant, meaning that the mitigation performance of beamformers sensitive to AOA will greatly deteriorate. In addition, the AOA of in-swath RFI and the target echo arrive simultaneously, thus the traditional beamformer will generate a distorted AP, deteriorating the SAR imagery. In light of these considerations, this article studies the in-swath and out-of-swath RFIs in elevation multichannel SAR and develops their countermeasures. Thereinto, a least
$\ell _{1}$
-norm model is developed to estimate the AOA of the RFI, followed by two schemes developed to separate the RFI. The former develops a beamformer that joint sidelobe control and null expanding to mitigate the space-variant out-of-swaths RFI, whereas the latter develops a blind source separation (BSS)-based technology to mitigate in-swath RFI, avoiding AP distortion and restoring SAR imagery. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is supported by experiments based on the measured X-band airborne DBF-SAR data as well as the simulated SAR data.