In along-track synthetic aperture radar systems, measurements from multiple phase centers can be used to remove bright stationary clutter in order to detect and estimate moving targets in the scene. The effectiveness of this procedure can be improved by increasing the number of antennas in the system. However, due to computational and communication constraints, it may be prohibitive to use a large number of antennas. In this work, an efficient resource allocation policy is provided to exploit sparsity in the scene, namely that there are few targets relative to the size of the scene. It is shown that even with limited computational resources, one can have significant estimation and computational gains over non-adaptive strategies. Moreover, the performance of the adaptive strategy approaches that of an oracle policy as the number of the stages grows large.

Date Published: 3 June 2013
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 8746, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XX, 87460F (3 June 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2020649

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8746:
Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XX
Edmund Zelnio; Frederick D. Garber, Editor(s)