Developed Kalman filter procedure for formation flying satellites SAR high-resolution imaging

Abstract

A radar system of formation flying satellites, which consists of small, individual satellites with each having a standard Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensor, has the advantage that adds independent angle-of-arrival sample information in addition to range-Doppler data. The additional samples are useful for producing high resolution SAR image as well as extending the image swathwidth. To accomplish this aim, we propose an improved imaging algorithm based on traditional Kalman Filter procedure to combine the data from all sensors. The method strongly improves the resolution by incorporating prior knowledge and spatial information of multiple receivers, which is a scientific breakthrough in the case that the traditional matched filter constrains the improvement of SAR spatial resolution. It is a optimal method in the sense of mean square error and its computation cost is lower than the traditional Kalman Filter algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.