SAR imaging of moving targets based on fusion of range-Doppler and probabilistic multi-hypothesis tracking algorithms

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging of a moving target has been a subject of interest because of its high-resolution target imaging and tracking capability. However, SAR was primarily designed for imaging stationary targets. Therefore, traditional SAR imaging algorithms suffer from low detection accuracy, inaccurate parameter estimation, and displace/defocus imaging due to the uncertainty of the target's motion. The motivation for this paper is to employ a tracking approach to track and estimate the target parameters accurately from the data returned by the SAR to resolve moving targets imaging issues. In this paper, we present a novel approach of combining the SAR range-Doppler Algorithm (RDA) with the probabilistic multi-hypothesis tracking (PMHT) algorithm in solving the problem of moving target imaging with periodically missing data in SAR. The algorithm is implemented on the raw SAR data, rather than on the processed SAR image, to reduce memory consumption and entail lower complexity. Results from simulated SAR data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by generating a well-focused SAR image.