Investigation of Multi-Channel SAR Calibration Methods for Real-Time Traffic Monitoring

Abstract

For traffic monitoring applications using multi-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems operating on high altitude it is essential, that the vehicles moving on ground can be detected and their parameters can be estimated in near real-time. In general software based adaptive calibration of each receiving channel has to be performed prior to ground moving target indication (GMTI) and parameter estimation. The calibration method used at present would require very high computational load for performing traffic monitoring in real-time. In the frame of the master thesis, existing and new channel calibration methods were investigated and implemented. The performances as well as the influence of these methods on the moving target signals were compared using real multi-channel SAR data acquired with DLR’s airborne F-SAR system. Results were analyzed in order to have some hints on where the actual calibration method used in the GMTI processor can be improved.