Scanning Radar Forward-Looking Superresolution Imaging Based on the Weibull Distribution for a Sea-Surface Target

To realize high azimuth resolution for sea-surface targets, this article proposes a superresolution imaging method that relies on the Weibull distribution. The proposed method introduces the generalized Gaussian distribution and Weibull distribution to represent the statistical distribution function of the target prior information and sea clutter, respectively. The corresponding objective function was derived under the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion. To address the nonlinearity of the objective function, this article adopts the Newton–Raphson iterative method to resolve it. Simulations and experimental data assessment indicate that the proposed method has superior superresolution imaging performance compared with other traditional superresolution methods for sea-surface target imaging.

I. Introduction

Radar forward-looking imaging has significant application value in military and civilian fields such as all-weather sea detection and imaging, sea disaster rescue, and ship navigation. Traditional radar imaging techniques such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and Doppler beam sharpening (DBS) [1], [2] cannot form a large Doppler bandwidth in the forward-looking area due to the limitations of the imaging mechanism, so they fail to work in the forward-looking area. Therefore, how to realize radar forward-looking imaging has become the hot and difficult problems.