A Novel Imaging-Based Target Detection and Parameter Estimation Scheme for Airborne Multichannel Circular Stripmap SAR

Airborne multichannel circular stripmap synthetic aperture radar (CSSAR)-ground moving target indication (GMTI) has drawn increasing attention in wide-area surveillance, reconnaissance, and traffic monitoring due to its short revisit times. In this article, a novel scheme for CSSAR-GMTI systems is proposed to offer high-resolution focusing of moving targets and enable efficient detection and accurate parameter estimation, which are ensured by integrating moving target imaging with a space–time adaptive processing (STAP) clutter suppression step. The presented scheme develops a target imaging algorithm that forms SAR images focused on a particular 2-D motion parameter to maximize target signal energy and recover its high resolution. Moreover, benefiting from the suitable phase compensation designed in the 2-D frequency domain, moving targets can finally be properly focused in the SAR image without displacement, and their parameters can be uniquely determined. Experiments on an emulated radar dataset are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.