Abstract
In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to estimate the micro-motion (m-m) of ships from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. To this end, observe that the problem of motion and m-m detection of targets is usually solved using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) along-track interferometry through two radars spatially separated by a baseline along the azimuth direction. The approach proposed in this paper for m-m estimation of ships, occupying thousands of pixels, processes the information generated during the coregistration of several re-synthesized time-domain and not overlapped Doppler sub-apertures. Specifically, the SAR products are generated by splitting the raw data according to a temporally small baseline using one single wide-band staring spotlight (ST) SAR image. The predominant vibrational modes of different ships are then estimated. The performance analysis is conducted on one ST SAR image recorded by COSMO-SkyMed satellite system. Finally, the newly proposed approach paves the way for application to the surveillance of land-based industry activities.
Highlights
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provides high-resolution images of static ground scenes, whereas processing of data containing ground object motion results in a variation of focused areas
With the above remarks in mind, we focus on maritime applications and estimate the displacement generated by the marine targets detected using a single synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image focused in Doppler sub-apertures
We provide some experimental results by analyzing the vibrational modes of two ships at anchor
Summary
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provides high-resolution images of static ground scenes, whereas processing of data containing ground object motion results in a variation of focused areas. Several methods were implemented in [13,14,15] for Earth displacement estimation by tracking only the magnitude of single-look-complex (SLC) couples of interferometric SAR images This procedure is evaluated in the course of the coregistration process where the azimuth and range shifts are used to build-up a two-dimensional displacement map. Illustrative examples, obtained on real recorded data, show the effectiveness of the proposed technique in estimating the vibrational fingerprint of the maritime vessels. These results pave the way for the application of the proposed technique to the surveillance of land-based industry facilities. The last section concludes the paper and introduces future research tracks
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