Application of Superresolution Techniques to Radar Imaging

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Application of Superresolution Techniques to Radar Imaging

Modern spectral estimation techniques (superresolution in technical jargon) have been applied to many fields of signal processing since many years[1][2]. Application to radar imaging, mainlyto ISAR (Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar) is documented in some recent papers[3] to [6]. Applications have been attempted also to SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar)[7][8]. In these fields the benefit ofspectral estimation reveals in a resolution beyond the Rayleigh limits set by compressed pulse andsynthetic aperture lengths. Furthermore very low sidelobes of point scatterer response are obtained.In this paper superresolution has been applied both to simulated stepped-frequency ISAR dataand to real ERS-1 SAR data; the achieved results are encouraging and suggest a more extensivepractical application of the technique. The paper is organized in two parts. In the first we have applied the autoregressive (AR) and the minimum variance (MV)-Capon methods to improve therange resolution of simulated ISAR data. In the second part we have conceived an upgraded versionof spectral analysis (SPECAN) processing to obtain a SAR image of better quality. The method hasbeen tested on recorded live data of ERS-1 mission.