Integrated Clutter Cancellation and High-Resolution Imaging of Moving Targets in Multi-channel SAR

An integrated clutter cancellation and moving targets focusing scheme is presented for Multi-channel SAR (M-SAR) systems. The integration between the two processing steps is made feasible by performing the clutter cancellation processing in the Doppler frequency domain, and performing the moving target focusing by means of a bank of Chirp Scaling Algorithms (CSA). The integration results efficient from a computational point of view, since the azimuth FFT is common to both the clutter cancellation and the focusing processing. The clutter cancellation step allows to achieve sub-clutter moving targets visibility. The bank of CSA filters, each one matched to a different along-track target velocity component allows to produce a high-resolution image of the target itself. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is shown with reference to a sample M-SAR dataset obtained from a SAREX-92 image.