GOTCHA experience report: three-dimensional SAR imaging with complete circular apertures

Emre Ertin; Christian D. Austin; Samir Sharma; Randolph L. Moses; Lee C. Potter

doi:10.1117/12.723245

7 May 2007 GOTCHA experience report: three-dimensional SAR imaging with complete circular apertures

Emre Ertin, Christian D. Austin, Samir Sharma, Randolph L. Moses, Lee C. Potter

Proceedings Volume 6568, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XIV; 656802 (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.723245
Event: Defense and Security Symposium, 2007, Orlando, Florida, United States

Abstract

We study circular synthetic aperture radar (CSAR) systems collecting radar backscatter measurements over a complete circular aperture of 360 degrees. This study is motivated by the GOTCHA CSAR data collection experiment conducted by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Circular SAR provides wide-angle information about the anisotropic reflectivity of the scattering centers in the scene, and also provides three dimensional information about the location of the scattering centers due to a non planar collection geometry. Three dimensional imaging results with single pass circular SAR data reveals that the 3D resolution of the system is poor due to the limited persistence of the reflectors in the scene. We present results on polarimetric processing of CSAR data and illustrate reasoning of three dimensional shape from multi-view layover using prior information about target scattering mechanisms. Next, we discuss processing of multipass (CSAR) data and present volumetric imaging results with IFSAR and three dimensional backprojection techniques on the GOTCHA data set. We observe that the volumetric imaging with GOTCHA data is degraded by aliasing and high sidelobes due to nonlinear flightpaths and sparse and unequal sampling in elevation. We conclude with a model based technique that resolves target features and enhances the volumetric imagery by extrapolating the phase history data using the estimated model.

Citation Download Citation

Emre Ertin, Christian D. Austin, Samir Sharma, Randolph L. Moses, and Lee C. Potter "GOTCHA experience report: three-dimensional SAR imaging with complete circular apertures", Proc. SPIE 6568, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XIV, 656802 (7 May 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.723245

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