An Adaptive Fast Factorized Back-Projection Algorithm With Integrated Target Detection Technique for High-Resolution and High-Squint Spotlight SAR Imagery

This paper deals with the problem of fast focusing the spotlight synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data in high-resolution and high-squint mode, which has shown its potential capacity in various military SAR applications. Fast factorized backprojection (FFBP) is considered as an ideal methodology for high-resolution and high-squint SAR imagery. However, FFBP performs pixel-by-pixel interpolation, yielding heavy computational burden and limiting its real-time processing. In this paper, target detection technique, which is used as a discrimination tool to retain the target pixels and reject the clutter and noise pixels, is integrated into the subaperture imaging chain during FFBP implementation, aiming to speed up the overall image formation time. Due to the characteristic of spotlight acquisition, an adaptive processing scheme is developed for multiple subaperture images detection. With the integrated target detection technique, only the target pixels need to be interpolated and accumulated coherently. Without loss of focusing performance, the number of interpolations is dramatically reduced. The proposed fast imaging algorithm is named as adaptive FFBP (AFFBP), and it has distinctive superiority for sparse scene reconstruction, such as the maritime target imaging. AFFBP has been successfully applied to two simulated scenes with high and low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), and two real measured datasets with squint angle high up to 50 degrees and 70 degrees, respectively. All these experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency improvement of the proposed AFFBP algorithm.