Along-track synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems can be used to remove the bright stationary clutter in order to more easily detect and track moving targets within the scene. In this work, we derive a Cramér Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) on the localization error of moving targets in these systems in the presence of correlated and spatially-varying noise. The CRLB is used to determine the minimum range/cross-range position and velocity estimation errors and is evaluated over radar and target parameters. Bounds were compared both over design parameters such as the number of antennas and the coherent processing interval, as well as non-design parameters such as signal quality and clutter coherence. Furthermore, the bias sensitivity of the CRLB to small estimator biases was analyzed.

Date Published: 13 June 2014
PDF: 21 pages
Proc. SPIE 9093, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XXI, 90930L (13 June 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2058257

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9093:
Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XXI
Edmund Zelnio; Frederick D. Garber, Editor(s)