Ground‐based radar data processing based on pseudo‐polar coordinate system

Abstract

Ground-based radar can make high-precision and real-time monitoring of micro changes in the observation area. It has been actually applied in various industries such as land, open-pit mines, water conservancy dams, and highway bridges. The basic principle of the ground-based radar is to transmit and receive electromagnetic wave signals in the distance direction and to perform pulse compression, a synthetic aperture is formed in the azimuth using the motion of the platform, and the electromagnetic wave signals are coherently accumulated to form a two-dimensional image. In this article, a fast and efficient pseudo-polar coordinate format imaging algorithm is proposed. First, in order to prevent defocusing, the authors use the Taylor approximation and the accuracy difference of the phase change due to the distance approximation is analysed. Second, the 2-D fast Fourier transform effectively achieves uniform sampling of data. The technique is validated with numerical simulations.