Reduction of False Alarm Rate in SAR-MTI Based on Weighted Kurtosis

Abstract

Moving target indication (MTI) is considered one of the most important applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in military operations and traffic monitoring. Although many studies have focused on detectors based on the statistical clutter models, a mismatch between the measured data and the applied statistical model often leads to unreliable MTI results, particularly in terms of false alarm rates. To reduce the number of false alarms, we propose an efficient MTI scheme consisting of conventional MTI techniques (the displaced phase center antenna (DPCA) and the interferogram's magnitude and phase (IMP) methods), which operate in dual-receive antenna (DRA) mode in an SAR system. These techniques are coupled with a new discrimination stage based on a new detection metric-weighted kurtosis. Using simulated and real measured data from TerraSAR-X, the proposed MTI scheme demonstrates robust performance in the reduction of false alarm rates with only a slight increase in the computation time compared with conventional schemes.