SAR sidelobe apodization using the Kaiser window

Traditional Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image processing involves a two-dimensional Fourier transform that may produce significant high intensity sidelobes. These artifacts have the potential of obscuring low intensity scatterers in the image. Spatially variant sidelobe apodization is a technique that reduces sidelobe levels in a Fourier image while maintaining the image resolution that would be obtained using the rectangular window. In this paper, the use of the Kaiser window for sidelobe apodization is studied. It is shown that the use of this window outperforms the use of the cosine-on-pedestal window. Albeit, the method proposed here is not easily implemented, high resolution and low sidelobe levels are obtained. The method was tested and results are shown when using this new sidelobe apodization technique on an actual SAR image.