Impact of ground mover motion and windowing on stationary and moving shadows in synthetic aperture radar imagery

This paper describes the impact of ground mover motion and windowing on stationary and moving shadows in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and video SAR mode imagery. The technique provides a foundation for optimizing algorithms that detect ground movers in SAR imagery. The video SAR mode provides a persistent view of a scene centered at the Motion Compensation Point (MCP). The radar platform follows a circular flight path. Detecting a stationary shadow in a SAR image is important because the shadow indicates a detection of an object with a height component near the shadow. Similarly, the detection of a shadow that moves from frame to frame indicates the detection of a ground mover at the location of the moving shadow. An approach analyzes the impact of windowing in calculating the brightness of a pixel in a stationary, finite-sized shadow region. An extension of the approach describes the pixel brightness for a moving shadow as a function of its velocity. The pixel brightness provides an upper bound on the Probability of Detection (PD) and a lower bound on the Probability of False Alarm (PFA) for a finite-sized, stationary or moving shadow in the presence of homogeneous, ideal clutter. Synthetic data provides shadow characteristics for a radar scenario that lend themselves for detecting a ground mover. The paper presents 2011-2014 flight data collected by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI).