Maritime Signature Correction With the NRL Multichannel SAR

• Published in: IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing Vol. 54; no. 11; pp. 6783 - 6790
• Main Authors: Sletten, Mark A., Rosenberg, Luke, Menk, Steven, Toporkov, Jakov V., Jansen, Robert W.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-11-2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Automobiles; Backscatter; Distortion; Doppler effect; Motion measurement; Oceans; radar remote sensing; Sea measurements; Synthetic aperture radar; synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
• ISSN: 0196-2892; 1558-0644
• DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2016.2590958

This paper describes the Naval Research Laboratory Multichannel Synthetic Aperture Radar (NRL MSAR) and presents initial results from the first field deployment of this system. The NRL MSAR is an airborne test bed designed to investigate remote sensing and surveillance applications that exploit multiple along-track phase centers, particularly applications that require measurement of scene motion. The system operates at X-band and supports 32 along-track phase centers through the use of two transmit horns and 16 receive antennas. As illustrated in this paper, SAR images generated with these phase centers can be coherently combined to directly measure scene motion using the velocity SAR algorithm, and these measurements can then be used to correct the image distortion that the motion causes. In September 2014, this unique radar was deployed for the first time on an airborne platform. This paper presents a description of the system and results from its inaugural deployment, including the correction of distorted maritime signatures. These data were collected over an ocean inlet and contain a variety of moving backscatter sources, including automobiles, ships, shoaling ocean waves, and tidal currents.