Search Results (4)

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is capable of monitoring the ocean all day, regardless of weather conditions. However, moving ships exhibit azimuth defocus in SAR images, which severely hampers ship recognition performance. Ships typically move in a linear motion at sea. For refocusing linear moving ships, existing SAR autofocus algorithms cannot accurately extract defocus information and require multiple iterations. To overcome the poor focusing quality and high computational complexity of existing refocusing algorithms, this paper proposes a fast and accurate refocusing scheme for moving ships in SAR imagery based on Fractional Fourier Transform (FrFT). Firstly, the azimuth line with the strongest energy in the SAR image is selected as the best azimuth line representing its motion property. Then, according to the entropy variation law of the azimuth line after FrFT, the azimuth line’s optimal rotation order is determined by the proposed minimum entropy search method, which can accurately and quickly obtain defocus information. In the final refocusing module, the scheme provides two ways, i.e., fast or fine refocusing approaches, to generate well-focused images. The fast refocusing approach performs FrFT on each azimuth line at the optimal rotation order of the best azimuth line. The fine refocusing approach takes the optimal rotation order of the best azimuth line as the initial value and further searches for the optimal rotation order of other azimuth lines. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, experiments are carried out on a number of Gaofen-3 SAR images in different acquisition modes. The experimental results show that the proposed fast refocusing approach can achieve the fastest speed, which is 2.1% of the traditional FrFT-based method’s processing time. Moreover, the proposed fine refocusing approach has the best focusing performance, achieving the lowest image entropy among existing methods. Full article

Moving ship refocusing is challenging because the target motion parameters are unknown. Moreover, moving ships in squint synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images obtained by the back-projection (BP) algorithm usually suffer from geometric deformation and spectrum winding. Therefore, a spectrum-orthogonalization algorithm that refocuses moving ships in squint SAR images is presented. First, “squint minimization” is introduced to correct the spectrum by two spectrum compression functions: one to align the spectrum centers and another to translate the inclined spectrum into orthogonalized form. Then, the precise analytic function of the two-dimensional (2D) wavenumber spectrum is derived to obtain the phase error. Finally, motion compensation is performed in the two-dimensional wavenumber domain after the motion parameter is estimated by maximizing the image sharpness. This method has low computational complexity because it lacks interpolation and can be implemented by the inverse fast Fourier translation (IFFT) and fast Fourier translation (FFT). Processing results of simulation experiments and the GaoFen-3 squint SAR data validate the effectiveness of this method. Full article

As an active microwave remote sensing device, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been widely used in the field of marine surveillance. However, moving ships appear defocused in SAR images, which seriously affects the classification and identification of ships. Considering the three-dimensional (3-D) rotational motions (roll, pitch, and yaw) of the navigating ship, a novel method for refocusing moving ships in SAR images based on inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) technique is proposed. First, a rectangular window is used to extract the defocused ship subimage. Next, the subimage is transformed into the ISAR equivalent echo domain, and the range migration and phase error caused by the identical movement of all ship scatterers are compensated. Then, the optimal imaging time can be selected by the maximum image contrast search method. Finally, the iterative adaptive approach (IAA) is used to obtain the image with high resolution. This method has satisfactory imaging performance in both azimuth resolution and image focus, and the amount of calculation is small due to the processing of subimages. Simulated data and Gaofen-3 real SAR data are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Full article

Moving ship targets appear blurred and defocused in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images due to the translation motion during the coherent processing. Motion compensation is required for refocusing moving ship targets in SAR scenes. A novel refocusing method for moving ship is developed in this paper. The method is exploiting inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) technique to refocus the ship target in SAR image. Generally, most cases of refocusing are for raw echo data, not for SAR image. Taking into account the advantages of processing in SAR image, the processing data are SAR image rather than raw echo data in this paper. The ISAR processing is based on fast minimum entropy phase compensation method, an iterative approach to obtain the phase error. The proposed method has been tested using Spaceborne TerraSAR-X, Gaofeng-3 images and airborne SAR images of maritime targets. Full article