Application of equalization notch to improve synthetic aperture radar coherent data products

Interference and interference mitigation techniques degrade synthetic aperture radar (SAR) coherent data products. Radars utilizing stretch processing present a unique challenge for many mitigation techniques because the interference signal itself is modified through stretch processing from its original signal characteristics. Many sources of interference, including constant tones, are only present within the fast-time sample data for a limited number of samples, depending on the radar and interference bandwidth. Adaptive filtering algorithms to estimate and remove the interference signal that rely upon assuming stationary interference signal characteristics can be ineffective. An effective mitigation method, called notching, forces the value of the data samples containing interference to zero. However, as the number of data samples set to zero increases, image distortion and loss of resolution degrade both the image product and any second order image products. Techniques to repair image distortions,1 are effective for point-like targets. However, these techniques are not designed to model and repair distortions in SAR image terrain. Good terrain coherence is important for SAR second order image products because terrain occupies the majority of many scenes. For the case of coherent change detection it is the terrain coherence itself that determines the quality of the change detection image. This paper proposes an unique equalization technique that improves coherence over existing notching techniques. First, the proposed algorithm limits mitigation to only the samples containing interference, unlike adaptive filtering algorithms, so the remaining samples are not modified. Additionally, the mitigation adapts to changing interference power such that the resulting correction equalizes the power across the data samples. The result is reduced distortion and improved coherence for the terrain. SAR data demonstrates improved coherence from the proposed equalization correction over existing notching methods for chirped interference sources.

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