Sandglass transformation for synthetic aperture radar detection and imaging of ship at low signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio

Space/air-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) detection and imaging of moving ships at sea are important for ocean reconnaissance and fishery monitoring. A novel algorithm based on sandglass transformation to detect weak ships and form high-quality images under the conditions of low signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio is presented here. It requires no prior information about motion parameters of targets. The sandglass transformation can decouple the time and lag time in the instantaneous autocorrelation function of a linear frequency modulated (LFM) signal. Thus the cross-range signals of ship in the approximate form of LFM signals can be integrated coherently via the two-dimensional fast Fourier transformation. The proposed algorithm can not only achieve high-energy accumulation gain, but also suppress the interference of cross terms effectively without loss of resolution. Hence, it is effective to detect weak ships and generate high-resolution images. Numerical and experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.