Bistatic Linear Antenna Array SAR for Moving Target Detection, Location, and Imaging With Two Passive Airborne Radars

• Published in: IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing 2007-03, Vol.45 (3), p.554-565
• Main Authors: Li, Gang, Xu, Jia, Peng, Ying-Ning, Xia, Xiang-Gen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Airborne radar; Aircraft antennas; Airplanes; Applied geophysics; Bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR); Chinese remainder theorem (CRT); Earth sciences; Earth, ocean, space; Exact sciences and technology; Geostationary satellites; Imaging; Internal geophysics; Linear antenna arrays; Linear arrays; moving target; Moving targets; Object detection; Passive radar; Position (location); Radar antennas; Radar imaging; Satellites; Spaceborne radar; Synthetic aperture radar; Transmitters
• ISSN: 0196-2892; 1558-0644
• DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2006.888145

In this paper, we propose a bistatic linear array synthetic aperture radar (BLA-SAR) system for moving target detection, location, and imaging. In the BLA-SAR system, a geostationary satellite is used as a transmitter, and two airborne linear array radars are used as passive receivers, where the transmitted waveforms from the geostationary satellite may have two different carrier frequencies, two linear array antennas on two different airplanes may be equipped with different spacings, or two airplanes may fly with two different velocities. It is shown that, using the BLA-SAR, not only the stationary clutter can be suppressed but also locations of both slow and fast moving targets can be accurately estimated. Furthermore, an effective BLA-SAR algorithm of moving target imaging is also proposed. Lastly, some numerical experiments are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the BLA-SAR