ABSTRACT In this article, a novel Scan mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging method for maritime surveillance is presented. Conventional Scan SAR is generally operated with severe azimuth resolution loss… Click to show full abstract
ABSTRACT In this article, a novel Scan mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging method for maritime surveillance is presented. Conventional Scan SAR is generally operated with severe azimuth resolution loss in order to cover a large area. The proposed imaging method changes the way Scan SAR illuminates sub-scenes and presents a new radar illuminating strategy based on ships’ spatial distribution in each sub-scene. To gain ships’ spatial distribution, a scene sensing algorithm based on radar range profiles together with a peak-seeking and clustering algorithm is introduced. After that, a Markov transfer-probability matrix is generated to make sure that radar illuminates each sub-scene randomly under the probability we calculated before. Finally, an imaging algorithm within the Lp (0 < p ≤ 1) regularization framework is utilized to reconstruct each sub-scene; the regularization problem is solved by an improved iterative thresholding algorithm. The whole wide swath image is joined by putting all the sub-scenes together. Experimental results support that the proposed imaging method can perform high-resolution wide swath SAR imaging effectively and efficiently without reducing the image resolution.
               
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