A Novel Signal Processing Technique for Ku-Band Automobile FMCW Fully Polarimetric SAR System Using Triangular LFM

Abstract

This article presents a novel signal technique for Ku-band automobile frequency-modulated continuous-wave fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (FMCW PolSAR) system using triangular linear frequency modulation (LFM). Our proposed system shows the first utilizations of triangular LFM for an FMCW PolSAR. The proposed signal processing algorithm is based on the range Doppler algorithm (RDA). We developed an FMCW PolSAR system that transmits triangular LFM signals, which are used less frequently than sawtooth LFM in an SAR sensor. Using a theoretical background, we describe its configuration and how it works. We propose the novel processing solution, which forms two kinds of single-polarization images from a raw data set and is suitable for our system. We obtained all four kinds of single-polarization images from two raw data sets while using the triangular LFM. In comparison, when using sawtooth LFM, we obtained the four images from four raw data sets by repeating the RDA four times. The proposed method simplifies the FMCW PolSAR system configuration and the processing algorithm. We collected FMCW PolSAR raw data from an experimentally equipped automobile while maintaining a constant speed on a highway. The proposed algorithm and system were validated by processing a high-resolution FMCW PolSAR image.