In-Flight Multi-Channel Calibration for Airborne Post-Doppler STAP

Abstract:
Multi-channel calibration is essential for detecting moving targets as well as for estimating their positions and velocities accurately. This paper presents an efficient calibration algorithm for along-track multi-channel systems, in particular for space-time adaptive processing (STAP) techniques. The proposed algorithm corrects not only the phase and magnitude offsets among the receive channels, but also the Doppler centroid variation considering the range dependency and the aircraft’s motion. Important parameters and offsets are estimated directly from the radar range-compressed data. The proposed algorithm is evaluated based on real multi-channel X-band data acquired by the DLR’s airborne system F-SAR. The experimental results show the potential of the proposed algorithm for traffic monitoring applications.