An Efficient Ground Manoeuvring Target Refocusing Method Based on Principal Component Analysis and Motion Parameter Estimation

Refocusing ground manoeuvring targets with complex motions in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remains a challenging objective because of the large range of cell migration (RCM) and time-varying Doppler frequency modulation (DFM). By exploiting the geometric information of RCM and two-dimensional (2-D) coherently integrated gain, a fast ground manoeuvring target refocusing method using principal component analysis (PCA) and high-order motion parameter estimation is proposed. First, an efficient phase difference (PD) method and PCA are utilized to correct the RCM, and then, the energy of the ground manoeuvring target is concentrated into the same range bin. Second, by utilizing the coherently integrated cubic phase function (CICPF) that was developed in our previous work, the motion parameters are obtained accurately, and the manoeuvring target is thus well refocused into a sharp peak point based on the estimated motion parameters. The proposed method is of low computational complexity because it avoids time-consuming search and interpolation operations and demonstrates an improved anti-noise performance due to fully exploiting the 2-D coherent accumulation characteristics for estimating motion parameters and enhanced refocused imaging results for manoeuvring targets due to adopting the high-order motion model. Finally, experiments are conducted using simulated and real SAR data to show the performance of the proposed method.