A stable realization of apodization filtering applied to noise SAR and SAR range sidelobe suppression

Abstract

Pulse response of radar system always suffers from high sidelobe level resulting in resolution degradation. Investigated here is a sidelobe suppression method based on apodization filtering technique for range responses of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and noise SAR systems. The core of apodization filtering is finding an appropriate filtering vector in time domain. Compared with original apodization filtering, the proposed method could be realized stably because it could get correct filtering vector efficiently. This method contains three important steps: constructing coefficient matrix and desired response vector; performing ill-posed analysis; and solving equation to find filtering vector. In these steps, convolution kernel method is adopted to construct coefficient matrix; spectral condition is introduced as an indicating function for ill-posed analysis; and total variation method is used to resolve ill-posed equation for getting filtering vector. Elaborate theoretical derivation is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of this method. In order to test its effect, simulation experiments are implemented. Simulation results show that there is a great suppression of range sidelobes after processed by this method. With increasing filter length, the performance of filtered output is improved but time cost is increasing correspondingly. Furthermore, the proposed method is also effective with noise disturbance.