Azimuth Ambiguity Detection and Suppression in SAR Images

We propose a novel SAR azimuth ambiguity suppression method. The proposed method is a post process for a SAR image; namely, it does not require any modification to the SAR image formation process nor the SAR system design. Noting that the azimuth ambiguity is blurred in the SAR image, the proposed algorithm refocuses the image to focus the azimuth ambiguity and then automatically detects and identifies the locations, and also the orders, of the ambiguities in the refocused image. After the detected ambiguities in the refocused image are eliminated, the final SAR image is obtained by refocusing back to the true image. Experimental results using true satellite images show that the proposed method successfully suppresses the ambiguities without causing severe degradations to the true images.