Radial Velocity Estimation of Ships on Open Sea in the Azimuth Multi-Channel SAR System

The azimuth multichannel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system can meet the requirements of high resolution and wide swath (HRWS) simultaneously, which overcomes the constraint of the traditional single-channel SAR. However, for a moving target illuminated by the azimuth multichannel SAR system, its radial velocity will lead to ambiguous components and mislocation in the image. Therefore, the radial velocity estimation plays an important role in improving the image quality and moving target relocation, especially for large ships on the open sea. However, as the pulse repetition frequency of a single channel is less than the Doppler spectrum, the traditional velocity estimation methods working in the image domain are out of action. This article suggests an idea that the issue of velocity estimation is converted into that of the linear phase errors estimation combining the linear fitting method, and it is assumed that the target has been already detected before applying the velocity estimation algorithms. To estimate the linear phase errors, two algorithms operating in the Doppler domain are introduced and compared, namely the subspace-based method and the modified frequency correlation method. The advantages of the proposed approaches are free from iteration operation and high accuracy. Besides, the effectiveness of the methods is demonstrated via simulation data and GaoFen-3 real data from ultra-fine stripmap mode. Finally, this article analyzes the velocity estimation accuracy of the two methods and the influence of channel imbalance through substantial experiments.