Onboard Processing Concept for Maritime Surveillance Demonstrated with DLR’s Airborne Radar Sensors F-SAR and DBFSAR

Inhalt:
In the paper an onboard processing concept for maritime surveillance applications is proposed. It is suited for airborne platforms and future high-altitude platforms (HAP). The concept uses range-compressed single- and multichannel radar data as input and doesn’t require time consuming synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing as conventionally needed when it comes to ship detection with spaceborne SAR systems. Small coherent processing intervals (CPIs) are used for detecting and tracking the ships in range-Doppler domain. In addition to the reduced processing requirements, the range-Doppler domain has the advantage that even ships with small radar cross section (RCS) can be detected when they move with a certain line-of-sight velocity so that their signals are shifted in Doppler to the exo-clutter region. In the paper the overall processing concept is briefly discussed and the effectiveness is demonstrated by using real radar data acquired with DLR’s airborne radar sensors F-SAR [1] and DBFSAR [2].