Radial Velocity Retrieval for Multichannel SAR Moving Targets with Time-Space Doppler De-ambiguity

Abstract: In this paper, with respect to multichannel synthetic aperture radars (SAR), we first formulate the problems of Doppler ambiguities on the radial velocity (RV) estimation of a ground moving target in range-compressed domain, range-Doppler domain and image domain, respectively. It is revealed that in these problems, a cascaded time-space Doppler ambiguity (CTSDA) may encounter, i.e., time domain Doppler ambiguity (TDDA) in each channel arises first and then spatial domain Doppler ambiguity (SDDA) among multi-channels arises second. Accordingly, the multichannel SAR systems with different parameters are investigated in three different cases with diverse Doppler ambiguity properties, and a multi-frequency SAR is then proposed to obtain the RV estimation by solving the ambiguity problem based on Chinese remainder theorem (CRT). In the first two cases, the ambiguity problem can be solved by the existing closed-form robust CRT. In the third case, it is found that the problem is different from the conventional CRT problems and we call it a double remaindering problem in this paper. We then propose a sufficient condition under which the double remaindering problem, i.e., the CTSDA, can also be solved by the closed-form robust CRT. When the sufficient condition is not satisfied for a multi-channel SAR, a searching based method is proposed. Finally, some results of numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.