Azimuth Location Deambiguity for SAR Ground Moving Targets via Coprime Adjacent Arrays

Abstract

The ground moving target's radial velocity estimation based on the interferometric phase in a multichannel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system suffers from 2π modulo folding, resulting in the target's azimuth location ambiguity in the SAR image. To address this problem, a novel coprime adjacent arrays SAR (CAA-SAR) is proposed in this paper. The two sparse uniform subarrays constituting the CAA are arranged adjacently with a conjunct element, then a virtual array can be obtained with much more virtual elements and smaller element spacing, which will help to solve the azimuth location ambiguity. After ground clutter suppression, multiple pixels’ samplings are utilized based on the MUSIC algorithm for estimating radial velocity as well as azimuth shift by exploiting all virtual elements of CAA-SAR. Compared with the existing nonuniform linear array SAR method based on Chinese remainder theorem, the CAA-SAR can obtain a better accuracy with the same number of elements in a larger sparse configuration, or use fewer elements to obtain an approximate accuracy in almost the same physical aperture. Compared with the coprime arrays SAR, the CAA-SAR has a better accuracy due to its larger number of unique virtual elements and longer physical aperture. Finally, some results of numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.