Balancing Target Noise against Thermal NoiseOn the Optimum Beamwidth for Mean Radar Reflectivity Estimation

Synthetic aperture radar algorithms provide images consisting of pixels containing information on the reflectivity of the imaged scene at locations corresponding to the pixels. The quality of such an image can be judged by several figures of merit such as azimuth resolution, which is directly influenced by the antenna´s beamwidth. This paper presents a novel figure of merit that also depends on the beamwidth and takes into account thermal receiver noise as well as noise originating from the nature of the target to be imaged. It is shown that the optimum beamwidth in terms of the novel figure of merit strongly depends on the type of object to be imaged and on noise parameters of the imaging system.