Vehicular MIMO SAR imaging in multipath environments

In this paper, multi-input multi-output (MIMO) forward looking synthetic aperture radar (FL-SAR) is developed for imaging from a moving ground vehicle in urban multipath environments. Conventional SAR is often seriously degraded by ghost artifacts with the same direction of arrival and delays as direct path returns. In this paper, MIMO methods are used to improve SAR images by suppressing directions of departure which would otherwise be multipath scattered and added to direct path returns. Both conventional and adaptive MIMO SAR methods are presented and compared in a multipath imaging simulation. The results suggest MIMO SAR may offers substantial gains versus conventional SIMO imaging in urban settings.