The influence of target acceleration on velocity estimation in dual-channel SAR-GMTI

This paper investigates the effects of target acceleration on estimating the velocity vector of a ground moving target from single-pass dual-channel synthetic aperture radar data. Although vehicles traveling on roads and highways routinely experience acceleration, the majority of estimation algorithms assume a constant velocity scenario, which may result in erroneous estimates of target velocity. It is shown that under most conditions, acceleration has only minor effects on the estimation of across-track velocity using along-track interferometric phase. However, under the assumption of constant velocity, acceleration may significantly bias the estimate of along-track velocity. The influence of both along-track and across-track accelerations is examined through simulations of an airborne geometry and experimental data from Environment Canada´s airborne CV 580 dual-channel synthetic aperture radar system.