Channel balancing algorithm in multichannel wide‐area surveillance systems

Channel balancing is one of the crucial steps to obtain a satisfactory result in multichannel moving target detection. Therefore many algorithms have been proposed to realise channel balancing in multichannel synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-ground moving target indication (GMTI) systems, such as an adaptive two-dimensional calibration algorithm, linear fitting algorithm and eigen-decomposition algorithm. However, all of these aforementioned algorithms have some small defects in certain conditions, when used in the real data of multichannel wide area surveillance (WAS)–GMTI systems. The small defects can increase the false alarm probability, which is undesirable in moving target detection. In this study, after the detailed analysis about the interference phase in the wide-area surveillance mode, a novel channel balancing algorithm is proposed to perform channel balancing in multichannel WAS–GMTI systems. The new algorithm mainly concentrates on the balancing of systematic azimuthal phase errors. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated when compared with other typical channel balancing algorithms in Monte Carlo simulations and real data processing.