Robust Wideband Waveforms for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Ground Moving Target Indication (GMTI) Applications

Neva Ridge Technologies proposes the development of a dual SAR-GMTI processor capable of producing SAR images of the ground scene and GMTI range-Doppler images of ground movers from the same return signal. This processor is capable of (though not limited to) operating on a single antenna. The radar will employ a pulsed noise waveform that is novel for this application. The sharply peaked autocorrelation properties of this waveform permit the use of an adaptive noise filter (ANF) for range compression purposes. This filter eliminates multiplicative noise. The output will be passed to a multi-rate algorithm which is successively down-sampled and band pass filtered in preparation for Doppler-compression to form a GMTI image. After the rate-reduction step, a high resolution SAR image will be formed. The goal is to achieve resolutions much finer than 1 meter on UHF systems and finer than 0.15 meters in the microwave region. Specific attention will be made to quantify the effect of the algorithm for FOPEN operation. A main advantage of the multi-rate dual SAR-GMTI processor proposed here is that it can be employed on inexpensive radar platforms such as lightweight UAV’s.