On the Mutual Interference Between Spaceborne SARs: Modeling, Characterization, and Mitigation

As the radio spectrum available to spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is restricted to certain limited frequency intervals, there are many different spaceborne SAR systems sharing common frequency bands. Due to this reason, it is reported that two spaceborne SARs at orbit cross positions can potentially cause severe mutual interference. Specifically, the transmitting signal of an SAR, typically linear frequency modulated (LFM), can be directly received by the side or back lobes of another SAR’s antenna, causing radiometric artifacts in the focused image. This article tries to model and characterize the artifacts and study efficient methods for mitigating them. To this end, we formulate an analytical model for describing the artifact, which reveals that the mutual interference can introduce a 2-D LFM radiometric artifact in image domain with a limited spatial extent. We show that the artifact is low-rank based on a range–azimuth decoupling analysis and 2-D high-order Taylor expansion. Based on the low-rank model, we show that two methods, i.e., principal component analysis and its robust variant, can be adopted to efficiently mitigate the artifact via processing in the image domain. The former method has the advantage of fast processing speed, for example, a subswath of Sentinel-1 interferometric wide swath image can be processed within 70 s via blockwise processing, whereas the latter provides improved accuracy for sparse pointlike scatterers. Experiment results demonstrate that the radiometric artifacts caused by mutual interference in Sentinel-1 level-1 images can be efficiently mitigated via the proposed methods.