Radar signal processing for SAR and GMTI - final report 2003

The research project "Radar signal processing for SAR and GMTI" has been conducted at FOI during the period 2001-2003. This report summarizes the most important research results. The project is motivated by the fact that the Swedish Armed Forces has a limited capability for detecting and engaging ground targets at long ranges. An increased demand of this capability is expected since Sweden is increasing its participation in international operations. The long-term objective of the project is to develop radar into an operational technology for surveillance of ground targets based on airborne SAR (synthetic aperture radar). The research in the project has mainly been focused on development and performance evaluation of FOI´s radar systems CARABAS and LORA which operate in the VHF and VHF/UHF bands, respectively. In particular, new algorithms have been developed to detect target changes as well as moving targets. Evaluation of the change detection algorithms on real radar data shows a significant performance advantage for ground target detection compared to microwave SAR - both for targets deployed in foliage concealment and in open terrain.