Ideal Point Target Research Articles

Fast Factorized Backprojection Algorithm in Orthogonal Elliptical Coordinate System for Ocean Scenes Imaging Using Geosynchronous Spaceborne–Airborne VHF UWB Bistatic SAR

Geosynchronous (GEO) spaceborne–airborne very high-frequency ultra-wideband bistatic synthetic aperture radar (VHF UWB BiSAR) can conduct high-resolution and wide-swath imaging for ocean scenes. However, GEO spaceborne–airborne VHF UWB BiSAR imaging faces some challenges such as the geometric configuration, huge amount of echo data, serious range–azimuth coupling, large spatial variance, and complex motion error, which increases the difficulty of the high-efficiency and high-precision imaging. In this paper, we present an improved bistatic fast factorization backprojection (FFBP) algorithm for ocean scene imaging using the GEO satellite-unmanned aerial vehicle (GEO-UAV) VHF UWB BiSAR, which can solve the above issues with high efficiency and high precision. This method reconstructs the subimages in the orthogonal elliptical polar (OEP) coordinate system based on the GEO satellite and UAV trajectories as well as the location of the imaged scene, which can further reduce the computational burden. First, the imaging geometry and signal model of the GEO-UAV VHF UWB BiSAR are established, and the construction of the OEP coordinate system and the subaperture imaging method are proposed. Moreover, the Nyquist sampling requirements for the subimages in the OEP coordinate system are derived from the range error perspective, which can offer a near-optimum tradeoff between precision and efficiency. In addition, the superiority of the OEP coordinate system is analyzed, which demonstrates that the angular dimensional sampling rate of the subimages is significantly reduced. Finally, the implementation processes and computational burden of the proposed algorithm are provided, and the speed-up factor of the proposed FFBP algorithm compared with the BP algorithm is derived and discussed. Experimental results of ideal point targets and natural ocean scenes demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which can achieve near-optimal imaging performance with a low computational burden.

Snow Depth Measurements With Ultra-Wideband Compact FMCW Radar on a Small Unmanned Aircraft System

This paper presents results from a field deployment of a small Unmanned Aircraft System (sUAS) radar in Colorado-Grand Mesa during Spring-2022 for measurements over snow. The stand-alone, low-power, compact, and Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar on a sUAS is used for these measurements. The radar operates over the frequency range of 2.8-5.8 GHz. The transmit signal is obtained by down-converting 77-81 GHz chirp generated with an automotive radar. The radar operates with a low output power of only 3 dBm (2 mW) to mitigate interference to nearby communication systems with a chirp duration of 250 μs. The received signal is up-converted back to 77-81 GHz for digitization and processing using the automotive radar data capture board. The radar data are processed with a fully focused Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) algorithm after applying phase and amplitude corrections to the transmitter chirp to obtain nearly ideal point target responses. The radar mapped air-snow and snow-ground surface interfaces as well as the snow internal layers with snow depth exceeding 2 m in areas covered with 15-25 m tall trees. In addition, the radar-generated snow thicknesses are within ±10 cm of in-situ measurements.

Vibration Measurement Method for Artificial Structure Based on MIMO Imaging Radar

Measuring the vibrating states of an artificial structure is an important approach to monitor the stability of the structure. However, the existing radar vibration measurement methods do not have enough azimuth resolution for measuring the vibrations in a relatively large scene, which contains multiple buildings or a large building. For such application scene, this paper proposes a vibration measurement method based on multiple-input multiple-output imaging radar system, which can achieve high azimuth resolution. Features of the proposed method are threefold: first of all, by utilizing the ability of quickly acquiring imaging data, the proposed method can achieve vibration measurement for the entire area simultaneously; second, in order to detect the positions of vibrating objects and decrease the time of vibration parameter estimation part, this paper proposes vibration similarity index to quantify the similarity between the detected signal and ideal vibration signal; at last, due to the limitations of the hardware performance, this paper adopts multiple signal classification least-squares estimation method to estimate the vibrating frequency and amplitude. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, ideal point target simulation and vibrating calibrator experiment have been conducted, and the results show that the positions and the vibrating parameters of the vibrating objects fit well with the reference values. In addition, car experiment and bridge experiment have been carried out to verify the ability of the proposed method to measure the vibration of real artificial structures, which cannot be seen as point targets.

Compensation method of multiple‐channel amplitude and phase errors for MIMO imaging radar

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar plays a more and more important role in radar imaging, target detection, and other fields owing to its unique array structure. Transmitting orthogonal signals by different transmitters, a MIMO radar can significantly enhance the azimuth resolution. It forms multiple observation channels from different transmit and receive array elements, achieving an equivalent large aperture in azimuth direction. However, the amplitude and phase errors in each channel are introduced, which will lead to inferior imaging performance of the system, especially in azimuth direction. To solve this problem, a method to estimate the amplitude and phase errors of each channel based on a strong scatterer is proposed here. Peak amplitude of one-dimensional range between channel is estimated using constrained least square (CLS) based on ideal point target characteristics. It proved to be valid by a simulation and an imaging experiment.

Raw Signal Simulation for Multi-Circular Synthetic Aperture Imaging at Terahertz Frequencies

Raw signal simulation is an important tool to test the effectiveness of the system parameters and imaging algorithms. A fast raw signal simulation method for multi-circular synthetic aperture imaging is proposed based on the inverse processing of the imaging algorithm and the nonuniform fast Fourier transform. The analytical description and processing procedure are presented. Simulation results of an ideal point target and a human model demonstrate the validity and effectiveness. Compared with the common time-domain method, the proposed method can achieve equivalent performance with higher efficiency.

Multi-linear sparse reconstruction for SAR imaging based on higher-order SVD

This paper focuses on the spotlight synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging for point scattering targets based on tensor modeling. In a real-world scenario, scatterers usually distribute in the block sparse pattern. Such a distribution feature has been scarcely utilized by the previous studies of SAR imaging. Our work takes advantage of this structure property of the target scene, constructing a multi-linear sparse reconstruction algorithm for SAR imaging. The multi-linear block sparsity is introduced into higher-order singular value decomposition (SVD) with a dictionary constructing procedure by this research. The simulation experiments for ideal point targets show the robustness of the proposed algorithm to the noise and sidelobe disturbance which always influence the imaging quality of the conventional methods. The computational resources requirement is further investigated in this paper. As a consequence of the algorithm complexity analysis, the present method possesses the superiority on resource consumption compared with the classic matching pursuit method. The imaging implementations for practical measured data also demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm developed in this paper.

Optimum 2-D Nonuniform Spatial Sampling for Microwave SAR-Based NDE Imaging Systems

Microwave and millimeter-wave synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-based imaging techniques, which are used for nondestructive evaluation (NDE), have shown tremendous usefulness for the inspection of a wide variety of complex composite materials and structures. An important practical issue associated with these imaging techniques is the required criteria associated with the physical gathering of the imaging data. In previous work on uniform sampling optimization, it was shown that the (uniform) spatial sampling density should be higher than the Nyquist density if preservation of spatial resolution, as defined by the half-power width of an ideal point target, is of interest. Conversely, nonuniform sampling has shown to provide effective signal reconstruction even for average spatial sampling densities below the Nyquist density-a distinct advantage over uniform sampling. This paper presents a comprehensive study into the optimization of nonuniform sampling for microwave SAR-based NDE imaging using three typical reconstruction techniques for nonuniformly sampled data, including natural interpolation, area-weighted Fourier integration, and conjugate gradient residual error minimization methods. To study the efficacy of these reconstruction methods, simulations of a point target were performed for a range of target distances and a range of average spatial sample separations. Resulting SAR images from the reconstruction techniques are then analyzed and compared according to two metrics: error between an image and an ideal image and resolution as determined by the half-power width of a point target. This is followed by experimental results corroborating the simulation results. Finally, nonuniform sampling requirements, given a minimum metric performance, are generalized for a given imager aperture size.

A Novel Method for Adaptive SAR Barrage Jamming Suppression

Based on the difference in statistical distribution between the target and jamming signal in the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image, this letter proposes a novel adaptive method for barrage jamming suppression. In this method, the covariance matrix of jamming is estimated from the SAR image. Then, the 2-D sinc function of the ideal point target is utilized as the steering vector to obtain the optimal adaptive filter. This filter can suppress the random barrage jamming effectively, thus improving the image contrast and interpretability. Additionally, this letter analyzes in detail the theoretical basis and performance of the proposed method. Finally, simulations are provided to demonstrate its effectiveness.

고해상도 SAR 최적 설계를 위한 영상형성 시스템 변수 및 성능분석에 관한 연구

합성 개구면 레이다(SAR: synthetic aperture radar)는 날씨 및 주 야간에 관계없이 고해상도의 영상을 형성할 수 있기 때문에 다양한 분야에서 활용되고 있다. 본 논문에서는 고해상도 SAR 설계시 경사거리와 합성개구면의 길이가 영상형성에 미치는 영향을 RMA 시뮬레이터를 이용하여 성능분석을 수행하였다. 형성된 영상의 성능은 직접 육안으로 확인할 수 있었으나, 영상을 분석하는 수치로서도 성능평가가 가능하였다. 보다 구체적으로, 다양한 경사거리와 합성개구면의 길이 변화와 영상획득을 위한 기하구조에 따라 이상적인 점표적에 대한 시뮬레이션의 원시 데이터를 생성하였고, Spotlight 영상 형성 알고리듬을 이용하여 이에 따른 점표적 응답특성의 공간 해상도, 최대 부엽 수준, 누적 부엽 수준에 대한 성능분석을 수행하였다. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been employed in various fields due to its capability to generate high resolution images regardless of weather and visibility. This paper presents a performance analysis on the image formation of high resolution SAR according to various slant range distance and synthetic aperture lengths using a range migration algorithm simulator. Although the visual performance on the SAR image is more accurate, a numeric analysis resulted in a comparable measurement. More specifically, raw data were generated for an ideal point target upon imaging geometries and design parameters such as slant range distance and synthetic aperture lengths. Finally, spatial resolution, peak to sidelobe ratio and integrated sidelobe ratio are drawn to provide SAR capabilities in the initial concept design, final in-flight calibration and validation stages.

RMA를 이용한 Spotlight SAR 영상형성 및 품질평가를 위한 시뮬레이터 개발 및 구현

합성 개구면 레이다(SAR: synthetic aperture radar)는 날씨 및 주/야간에 관계없이 고해상도의 영상을 형성할 수 있기 때문에 다양한 분야에서 활용되고 있다. 본 논문에서는 영상 형상 및 품질 평가, 분석을 위한 Spotlight SAR 시뮬레이터를 제안한다. SAR 영상 품질의 예측은 초기 개념 설계 단계부터 최종적인 비행 검증 및 보정 단계에 걸쳐 필수적이다. 제안된 SAR 시뮬레이터는 시스템 설계 변수들에 기반을 두고 있어 전체 시스템 개발과정에서 SAR 영상의 품질을 예측 분석할 수 있다. 이를 위해 영상 획득 기하구조와 다양한 SAR 시스템 설계변수들을 고려하여 이상적인 점표적에 대한 시뮬레이션 원시 데이터를 생성하고 Spotlight 영상 형성 알고리듬을 구현함으로서 점표적 응답특성을 추정한다. 마지막으로 공간 해상도, 최대 부엽 수준, 누적 부엽 수준 등의 주요 품질변수들을 중심으로 생성된 원시 데이터의 영상 품질을 분석한다. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is widely used because of high resolution imaging capability in all weather and day/night condition. In this paper development of Spotlight SAR simulator is proposed for image quality analysis. Proposed SAR simulator is based on the SAR system design parameters so that SAR image performance can be expected which is essential throughout the full system development procedure from the initial concept design stage to the final in-flight calibration and validation stage. The raw data of ideal point target is first generated by taking account of the flight and imaging geometry and the various SAR system design parameters, and the Spotlight image formation algorithm is implemented in order to obtain the point target response. Finally the image quality of the generated raw data is analyzed in terms of spatial resolution, peak to sidelobe ratio and integrated sidelobe ratio.

An automatic method for determining the centre of rotation of a mechanically scanned UCT system

A method is described for determining the centre of rotation of a mechanically scanned reflection ultrasound computed tomography system. It is based on the principle of obtaining opposing images of a test object containing many point targets. The method is automatic in the sense that the centre of rotation is calculated by a computer without the need for an operator to make direct measurements on the mechanical system. For the particular reflection UCT system described here, the centre of rotation is obtained in 3-5 min with a repeatability (+or-2 SD) of +or-0.3 mm. Ways in which even higher accuracy can be obtained are discussed. The basic principle of the method is applicable to any concentric imaging system for which a good approximation to an ideal point target can be produced.

Ambiguity Diagram for Linear FM Sonar

Ambiguity diagrams are useful in estimating the range and Doppler resolution of radar and sonar systems in which the returning echo is correlated with a stored replica of the transmitted pulse. In the conventional approach for linear FM pulses, the equations are simplified by regarding the Doppler shift as a simple frequency translation, applied equally to all frequencies within the bandwidth. This approximation, while satisfactory for most radar applications, is in general not valid for sonar pulses. In this paper, the general equations are derived for the correlation function of a linear FM pulse, taking into account the effect o the Doppler shift on both the frequency sweep rate and the carrier frequency. An ideal point target is assumed. Computations based on a close approximation to the general case have been made for four 1-sec pulses with carrier frequencies of 10 and 20 kc/sec and sweep rates of 50 and 600 cps2. The ambiguity diagrams for the low sweep rate are almost identical with those of the “radar case,” whereas the diagrams for the high sweep rate are greatly shortened. A criterion for the applicability of the radar approximation is developed.