Beam Footprint Detection and Tracking for Non-cooperative Bistatic SAR

Abstract

In non-cooperative bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the position of transmitter’s beam footprint should be detected and tracked in real-time to perform beam synchronization. Theoretical analysis shows that signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the reflected echoes from the observational scene is too low to apply the conventional detection and tracking method. According to the cross correlation and Doppler frequency information of the backscattering echo, a beam footprint detection and tracking method is proposed in this paper. This method can realize accumulation of signal energy, therefore enormously improve the performance of beam footprint detection and tracking. Meanwhile, vehicle-based bistatic SAR experiment and airborne bistatic SAR experiment are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed beam footprint detection and tracking method. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs well for real-time transmitter beam footprint detection and tracking.