An Efficient Radio Frequency Interference Mitigation Algorithm in Real Synthetic Aperture Radar Data

Abstract

As a wideband radar system, a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) may conflict with several electromagnetic systems, such as frequency modulation (FM), TV, and other communication systems. These signals, termed as radio frequency interference (RFI), may severely interfere SAR systems from generating a high-resolution image. Numerous previous researches focused on the RFI suppression problem, among which the semiparametric methods have been verified to have the state-of-the-art performance. However, most of the semiparametric methods are computationally expensive and can hardly be used on wide-swath SAR imaging processing. In this article, an efficient semiparametric algorithm is proposed to suppress RFIs via alternating projections. It has comparable performance as the other methods but significantly improves the computational efficiency a lot. It is able to remove both narrowband and wideband RFIs and can be used directly on the Level-1 SAR data. Finally, multiple real SAR data are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.