Paper
20 June 1997 Target and background measurements over land and sea with a polarimetric 35/94-GHz synthetic aperture radar
Stephan Boehmsdorff, Helmut Essen
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
To detect and identify targets in their natural environment, millimeterwave sensors are appropriate tools for a variety of civilian and military applications. To generate high resolution images the synthetic aperture approach is the favorite method also for the millimeterwave bands. These wavelengths allow some simplifications in the algorithms to be applied, namely the image distortions due to range migration and depth of focus can be neglected. The short aperture time which is reduced by the factor of the wavelength for an equal cross range resolution, leads to a much lesser influence of flight instabilities of the airborne platform, than have to be taken into account for classical microwave SAR. It is also remarkable that the amount of speckle is considerably reduced for the higher millimeterwave-bands which allows single-look processing. The polarimetric high resolution experimental radar MEMPHIS (Millimeterwave Experimental Multifrequency Polarimetric High Resolution Imaging System) with simultaneous operating front-ends at 35 GHz and 94 GHz has been installed onboard a cargo aircraft in side looking configuration. Different scenes over land and sea were passed with this system and the data were processed by means of a SAR algorithm. The paper describes the system configuration and the SAR processing algorithm, gives representative results for the generated radar images and compares the results at 35 and 94 GHz.
© (1997) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Stephan Boehmsdorff and Helmut Essen "Target and background measurements over land and sea with a polarimetric 35/94-GHz synthetic aperture radar", Proc. SPIE 3062, Targets and Backgrounds: Characterization and Representation III, (20 June 1997); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.276669
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KEYWORDS
Radar

Synthetic aperture radar

Image resolution

Polarimetry

Detection and tracking algorithms

Image processing

Target detection

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