SAR imagery using chaotic carrier frequency agility pulses

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems are getting more and more applications in both civilian and military remote sensing missions. With the increasing deployment of electronic countermeasures (ECM) on modern battlefields, SAR encounters more and more interference jamming signals. The ECM jamming signals cause the SAR system to receive and process erroneous information which results in severe degradations in the output SAR images and/or formation of phony images of nonexistent targets. As a consequence, development of the electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM) capability becomes one of the key problems in SAR system design. This paper develops radar signaling strategies and algorithms that enhance the ability of synthetic aperture radar to image targets under conditions of electronic jamming. The concept of SAR using chaotic carrier frequency agility pulses (CCFAP-SAR) is first proposed. Then the imaging procedure for CCFAP-SAR is discussed in detail. The ECCM performance of CCFAP-SAR for both depressive noise jamming and deceptive repeat jamming is analyzed. The impact of the carrier frequency agility range on the image quality of CCFAP-SAR is also studied. Simulation results demonstrate that, with adequate agility range of the carrier frequency, the proposed CCFAP-SAR performs as well as conventional radar with linear frequency modulation (LFM) waveform in image quality and slightly better in anti-noise depressive jamming; while performs very well in anti-deception jamming which cannot be rejected by LFM-SAR.