Analysis of SAR Moving Grid Processing for Focusing and Detection of Ground Moving Targets

This paper investigates the performance of single-channel SAR-GMTI systems in the focusing and detection of translating ground targets moving in the presence of a clutter background. Specifically, focusing and detection performance is investigated by applying the Moving Grid Processing (MGP) focusing technique to a scene containing an accelerating target moving in the presence of both uniform and correlated K-distributed clutter backgrounds. The increase in detection sensitivity resulting from the focusing operation is found to result from two separable effects, target focusing and clutter defocusing. While the detection sensitivity gain due to target focusing is common for both clutter types, the gain due to clutter defocusing is found to be significantly greater for textured clutter than for uniform clutter, by approximately 5 to 6 dB in the simulated scenario under consideration. This paper concludes with a discussion of the phenomenological causes for this difference and implications of this finding for single channel SAR-GMTI systems operating in heterogeneous clutter environments.