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The Back Projection (BP) algorithm is an important direction in the development of synthetic aperture radar imaging algorithms. However, the large computational load of the BP algorithm has hindered its development in engineering applications. Therefore, techniques to enhance the computational efficiency of the BP algorithm have recently received widespread attention. This paper discusses the fast BP algorithm based on various imaging plane coordinate systems, including the distance-azimuth plane coordinate system, the ground plane coordinate system, and the non-Euclidean coordinate system. First, the principle of the original BP algorithm and the impact of different coordinate systems on accelerating the BP algorithm are introduced, and the development history of the BP algorithm is sorted out. Then, the research progress of the fast BP algorithm based on different imaging plane coordinate systems is examined, focusing on the recent research work completed by the author’s research team. Finally, the application of fast BP algorithm in engineering is introduced, and the research development trend of the fast BP imaging algorithm is discussed.

Change detection is a crucial remote sensing (RS) application because it can locate the interesting changed regions and provide corresponding time-series information with multitemporal RS images acquired in the same region. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR), with the advantages of all-day and all-weather conditions, can achieve high-resolution imaging from long operation distances. Moreover, the coherence imaging characteristics of the SAR system cause the attained complex-value images to be more sensitive to ground surface features. Traditional intensity-based change detection methods merely use the intensity difference between multitemporal images; thus, the results only reflect the significant landmark changes, such as seismic disasters and flood disasters. In this article, we use the coherent imaging characteristics of the SAR complex images to detect very subtle changes, such as vehicle tracks and footprints. Specifically, coherent change detection based on amplitude and phase generates a difference image utilizing the repeat-pass repeat-geometry SAR images, while the global attention-based convolutional neural network achieves automatic subtle change track extraction from the difference images. The experimental results based on our measured airborne SAR data demonstrate that our proposed method reduces the sensitivity of the detectable changed region from the meter level to the centimeter level, further providing our method with the ability to detect very subtle changes, such as vehicle tire tracks or footprints by human activities. This subtle change detection capability can be used for the search and rescue of vehicles and personnel lost in the field.

Dedicated to synchronously acquiring large-area, high-precision, and multi-scale ocean wind and wave information, a novel concept of a spaceborne ocean microwave dual-function integrated sensor is proposed in this paper. It integrates the functions of a scatterometer and SAR by sharing a single phased-array antenna. An overview of the scientific requirements and motivations for the sensor are outlined firstly. In order to fulfill the observation requirements of both the functions, the constraints on the system parameters such as frequency, antenna size, and incidence angle are analyzed. Then, the selection principles of these parameters are discussed within the limitations of antenna area, bandwidth, available time, and cost. Additionally, the constraints on the time sequence of transmitting and receiving pulses are derived to ensure that there is no conflict when the two functions operate simultaneously. Subsequently, a method for jointly designing the pulse repetition frequency (PRF) of both the functions is introduced, along with zebra maps to verify its effectiveness. At the end of the paper, the system and performance parameters of the sensor are given for further insight into it.

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data are integrated to extract the 3-D surface deformations, which are of great significance for studying geological hazards. In this study, two major problems are focused on integration. For one thing, we propose an iterated almost unbiased estimation (IAUE) method to estimate the variance components of GNSS and InSAR for the case where the estimation of variance components of multisource data by traditional variance component estimation methods may be negative and inaccurate. For another, considering that heterogeneous data errors may lead to unstable 3-D solutions, we propose adding the Laplacian smoothness constraint (LSC) to the function model, which can smooth the solutions by minimizing the second derivative of the displacements. These two methods are abbreviated as IAUE-LSC. In the simulation experiment, the performance of traditional Helmert variance component estimation is first compared with IAUE. IAUE can not only converge more quickly, but also avoid negative variances. Furthermore, we find that the excessively large relative error ratio between GNSS and InSAR is an essential factor leading to the instability of the 3-D solutions. The IAUE-LSC method is immune to this instability and can obtain more stable results. In addition, the 2018 Hawaii case demonstrates that IAUE achieves improvements of 2.58, 2.77, and 7.69 cm in the east, north, and up directions relative to the traditional weighted least-squares method, while the combined IAUE-LSC achieves improvements of 2.29, 0.32, and 1.68 cm compared to the IAUE alone.

The rotation matching between synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical images is essential for their registration. In this article, we introduce a novel fast rotation matching method for SAR and optical images. In the method, the absolute directional derivative histograms (ADDHs) of SAR and optical images can be used to reflect the rotation difference between them, and then the rotation difference is removed by the cross correlation of the two images’ ADDHs. Subsequently, we generate the ADDHs by oriented Gaussian-Gamma-shaped operator. Then, the cross correlation based on fast Fourier transform is used to deal with the ADDHs of SAR and optical images in order to determine the rotation difference of the two images. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect the rotation difference in various conditions and achieves rotation matching with high speed.

In the Medium-Earth-Orbit Synthetic Aperture Radar (MEO SAR), the curved trajectory and long synthetic aperture time lead to a two-dimensional spatial variation in the signals. Traditional methods usually process the range and azimuth variations separately, and the computational complexities are high. Herein, we study the Doppler rate distribution across a large scene and propose a non-orthogonal and nonlinear coordinate system wherein the MEO SAR signals satisfy the azimuth-shift–invariant property. Thus, the efficiency of the image formation processor can be significantly improved. The higher-order Doppler parameters are addressed by the Doppler linearization. Then, more precise focusing can be achieved, and the azimuth time-shift caused by the changes in signal distribution is addressed. Finally, the processing results of simulated stripmap-mode data with a 2-m resolution are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

This paper proposes an imaging algorithm for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mounted on a high-speed maneuvering platform with squint terrain observation by progressive scan mode. To overcome the mismatch between range model and the signal after range walk correction, the range history is calculated in local polar format. The Doppler ambiguity is resolved by nonlinear derotation and zero-padding. The recovered signal is divided into several blocks in Doppler according to the angular division. Keystone transform is used to remove the space-variant range cell migration (RCM) components. Thus, the residual RCM terms can be compensated by a unified phase function. Frequency domain perturbation terms are introduced to correct the space-variant Doppler chirp rate term. The focusing parameters are calculated according to the scene center of each angular block and the signal of each block can be processed in parallel. The image of each block is focused in range-Doppler domain. After the geometric correction, the final focused image can be obtained by directly combined the images of all angular blocks. Simulated SAR data has verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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.

Spectrum analysis (SA) plays an important role in radar signal processing, especially in radar imaging algorithm design. Because it is usually hard to obtain the analytical expression of spectrum by the Fourier integral directly, principle of stationary phase (POSP)-based SA is applied to approximate this integral. However, POSP requires the phase of the signal to vary rapidly, which is not the case in circular synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and turntable inverse SAR (ISAR). To solve this problem, a new SA method based on time-frequency reversion (TFRSA) is proposed, which utilizes the relationship of the Fourier transform pairs and their corresponding signal phases. In addition, the connection between the imaging geometry and time-frequency relationship is also analyzed and utilized to help solve the time-frequency reversion. When the TFRSA is applied to the linear trajectory SAR, the obtained spectrum expression is the same as the result of POSP. When it is applied to ISAR, the spectrum expressions of near-field and far-field are derived and their difference is found to be position-independent. Based on this finding, an extended polar format algorithm (EPFA) for near-field ISAR imaging is proposed, which can solve the distortion and defocusing problems caused by traditional ISAR imaging algorithms. When it is applied to the circular SAR (CSAR), a new and efficient imaging method based on EPFA is proposed, which can solve the low efficiency problem of conventional BP-based CSAR imaging algorithms. The simulations and real data processing results are provided to validate the effectiveness of proposed method.

As an indispensable ecological parameter, surface soil moisture (SSM) is of great significance for understanding the growth status of vegetation. The cooperative use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical data has the advantage of considering both vegetation and underlying soil scattering information, which is suitable for SSM monitoring of vegetation areas. The main purpose of this paper is to establish an inversion approach using Terra-SAR and Landsat-7 data to estimate SSM at three different stages of corn growth in the irrigated area. A combined scattering model that can adequately represent the scattering characteristics of the vegetation coverage area is proposed by modifying the water cloud model (WCM) to reduce the effect of vegetation on the total SAR backscattering. The backscattering from the underlying soil is expressed by an empirical model with good performance in X-band. The modified water cloud model (MWCM) as a function of normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI) considers the contribution of vegetation to the backscattering signal. An inversion technique based on artificial neural network (ANN) is used to invert the combined scattering model for SSM estimation. The inversion method is established and verified using datasets of three different growth stages of corn. Using the proposed method, we estimate the SSM with a correlation coefficient R ≥ 0.72 and root-mean-square error R M S E ≤ 0.043 cm 3 /cm 3 at the emergence stage, with R ≥ 0.87 and R M S E ≤ 0.046 cm 3 /cm 3 at the trefoil stage and with R ≥ 0.70 and R M S E ≤ 0.064 cm 3 /cm 3 at the jointing stage. The results suggest that the method proposed in this paper has operational potential in estimating SSM from Terra-SAR and Landsat-7 data at different stages of early corn growth.

Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) products may be significantly distorted by microwave signals traveling through the ionosphere, especially with long wavelengths. The split-spectrum method (SSM) is used to separate the ionospheric and the nondispersive phase terms with lower and higher spectral sub-band interferogram images. However, the ionospheric path delay phase is very delicate to the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) parameters including orbit vectors, slant range, and target height. In this paper, we get the impact of SAR parameter errors on the ionospheric phase by two steps. The first step is getting the derivates of geolocation with reference to SAR parameters based on the range-Doppler (RD) imaging model and the second step is calculating the derivates of the ionospheric phase delay with respect to geometric positioning. Through the numerical simulation, we demonstrate that the deviation of ionospheric phase has a linear relationship with SAR parameter errors. The experimental results show that the estimation of SAR parameters should be accurate enough since the parameter errors significantly affect the performance of ionospheric correction. The root mean square error (RMSE) between the corrected differential interferometric SAR (DInSAR) phase with SAR parameter errors and the corrected DInSAR phase without parameter errors varies from centimeter to decimeter level with the L-band data acquired by the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Array type L-band SAR (PALSAR) over Antofagasta, Chile. Furthermore, the effectiveness of SSM can be improved when SAR parameters are accurately estimated.

Considering the difficulty of pulse repetition frequency (PRF) design in multi-angle SAR when using ultra-high speed platforms, a multi-angle SAR imaging system in a unified coordinate system is proposed. The digital multi-beamforming is used in the system and multi-angle SAR data can be obtained in one flight. Therefore, the system improves the efficiency of data recording. An improved range migration algorithm (RMA) is used for data processing, and imaging is made in a unified imaging coordinate system. The resolution of different view images is the same, and there is a fixed delay between the images. On this basis, the SAR image fusion is performed after image matching. The results of simulation and measured data confirm the effectiveness of the system and the method.

Multichannel SAR is an effective approach to solving the contradiction between high azimuth resolution and wide swath. The goal of this paper is to obtain a new and effective method for estimating and compensating the interchannel phase error of the Chinese GF-3 Synthetic aperture radar (SAR). A channel phase error correction method based on the optimal value of the image domain quality function is proposed. In this method, the phase error is initially compensated using the correlation function method. In the fine correction of dual-channel phase error, a heuristic search algorithm is used to estimate the residual phase by searching the extremum of the quality function. After phase compensation in the image domain, the azimuth ambiguities caused by the remaining phase are eliminated. The proposed image domain processing method provides a new idea for channel phase error correction. The measured data of high-resolution GF-3 dual-channel ultrafine imaging mode verifies the validity of this method.

In recent years, terahertz imaging systems and techniques have been developed and have gradually become a leading frontier field. With the advantages of low radiation and clothing-penetrable, terahertz imaging technology has been widely used for the detection of concealed weapons or other contraband carried on personnel at airports and other secure locations. This paper aims to detect these concealed items with deep learning method for its well detection performance and real-time detection speed. Based on the analysis of the characteristics of terahertz images, an effective detection system is proposed in this paper. First, a lots of terahertz images are collected and labeled as the standard data format. Secondly, this paper establishes the terahertz classification dataset and proposes a classification method based on transfer learning. Then considering the special distribution of terahertz image, an improved faster region-based convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN) method based on threshold segmentation is proposed for detecting human body and other objects independently. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method for terahertz image detection.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) using stepped frequency (SF) waveforms enables a high two-dimensional (2D) resolution with wider imaging swath at relatively low cost. However, only the stripmap mode has been discussed for SF MIMO-SAR. This paper presents an efficient algorithm to reconstruct the signal of SF MIMO-SAR in the spotlight and sliding spotlight modes, which includes Doppler ambiguity resolving algorithm based on subaperture division and an improved frequency-domain bandwidth synthesis (FBS) method. Both simulated and constructed data are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.