Effects of speed difference on accelerating target imagery signatures for broadside SAR

Recent analyses have showed that moving target smears in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery are not constrained to have the shapes of simple parabolas but instead can have a wide variety of two-dimensional (2D) shapes, including self-crossing signatures. The current study investigates the properties of the central smear contour under the conditions of varying the target speed difference for targets which transition from lower to higher speed. This investigation reveals that these theoretical predictions of the signature contour shapes yield excellent agreement with the SAR image formation imagery results applied to simulated radar data.