Sidelobe rotation and apodization

Sidelobes in imagery from radar and other sensors can be troublesome because they obscure useful information within the image. Much effort has been made in the radar community to control sidelobes and many window weighting and apodization schemes are in existence [F. Harris, (1978), W.G. Carrara, (1995)]. We present here a novel algorithm, firstly to rotate sidelobes to uncover image information. The approach has been further developed into an apodization scheme. The approach has been applied in several forms, one of which outputs imagery of a resolution higher than that resulting from the standard window weightings, such as the Hamming. The algorithms have been applied to real and simulated data at both image processing and post-processing stages. Here we show results from three case studies, including from a ground-vehicle target. We show that scattering centers are associated with vehicle features, implying that they are not image artifacts.