Spatially variant incoherence trimming for improved bistatic SAR CCD

Abstract

Conventional Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Coherent Change Detection (CCD) has been found to be of great utility in detecting changes that occur on the ground. The CCD procedure involves performing repeat pass radar collections to form a coherence product, where ground disturbances can induce detectable incoherence. However there is usually a difference in the radar collection geometry which can lead to incoherent energy noise entering the CCD. When sensing flat terrain in a far-field regime, the incoherence due to collection geometry difference can be removed through a conventional global Fourier image support trimming process. However, it has been found that when the terrain is either in a near-field regime or contains non-flat topography, the optimal trimming process is substantially more involved, so much so that a new per-pixel SAR bistatic back-projection imaging algorithm has been developed. The new algorithm removes incoherent energy from the bistatic SAR CCD collection pair on a per-pixel basis according to the local radar geometry and topography, leaving a higher coherence CCD product. In order to validate the approach, change detection measurements were conducted with GB-SAR, a ground-based indoor radar measurement facility.