An Introduction to Synthetic Aperture Radar Resolution

Sahand Noorizadeh
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, Georgia 303320250 Email: sahand@gatech.edu

AbstractThis paper is the nal project report of the Introduction to Radar and Electromagnetic Remote Sensing (ECE 4390) course in Spring 2010 at Georgia Institute of Technology

I. I NTRODUCTION The common perception of radar is a stationary rotating antenna that produces signals representing moving objects. A commonly refereed type of radar is the airport surveillance radar. A less known type of radar is the imaging radar. The idea of imaging radars is not too different from the airport surveillance radars. In imaging radars, the objects are usually stationary and the radar is what is in motion and also the objective is to capture a two-dimensional topographic image. In simple terms, they are non-optical cameras. Imaging radars have been used in many applications for mapping the Earth and other planets with optically opaque atmospheres and monitoring changes on the ground surfaces of interest to geologists and many other military applications. Synthetic aperture radars (SARs) are imaging radars that by taking advantage of the motion of the radar and utilizing sophisticated signal processing, limitations imposed by physical and electrical constraints are improved. SARs are able to extract two-dimensional images of an area of a surface (target) from the received signals with very high resolution. This paper provides a brief introduction to synthetic aperture radar resolution and its related parameters. II. SAR C ONCEPTS The simple geometry of SAR is shown in Figure 1. Where is the relative time with respect to the instant that the target rst becomes visible to the antenna beamwidth, R0 is the shortest range between the sensor and the target, and Vs is the velocity of the sensor or the footprint. The concept of SAR resolution will be discussed in detail in the following section but it sufces at this point to point out that the narrower the width of the footprint along the azimuth the ner the resolution of the width of the image (theres also another resolution along the signal which will be discussed in the next section). Assuming a stationary radar in the sky, the width of the footprint is determined by the azimuth 3-dB beamwidth of the antenna and is given by Eq. 1. ra RB = R D (1)

Fig. 1.

SAR geometery.

Where the subscript ra denotes the resolution due to the real aperture of the antenna, D, R is the range between the center of the footprint and the antenna, and is the wavelength of the transmitted frequency. Even for high-frequency radars with large antenna aperture, ra is a few kilometers which is hardly enough to resolve a few blocks of a city. Synthetic aperture radars exploit the forward motion of the platform (radar carrier such as an airplane or a satellite) with the help of advanced digital signal processing to synthesize a large antenna aperture which in turn increases the range resolution (compress the footprint width along the azimuth axis) without unrealistically large antenna apertures. Carl Wiley who was the rst person to describe the concept of SAR named this technique Doppler Beam Sharpernning [1]. III. SAR R ESOLUTION There are two resolutions associated with the SAR image: Crossrange (or azimuth) resolution which determines the width of a resolvable area along the direction of the radar motion and Range resolution which determines the minimum separation of two resolvable objects inside the footprint along the radiating beam. Figure 2 shows these resolutions inside the footprint. Synthetic aperture radars use two different techniques to improve these two resolutions. The concept behind

these techniques are discussed next. A. Range Resolution Ignoring the motion of the radar for the moment, along the radiation line, SAR is mainly a range detection radar which transmits a train of pulses with a certain pulse repetition frequency (PRF) and receives a time delayed version of the original signals determined by the range between the radar and the targets. Figure 3 shows the geometry of SAR with the range on the x-axis.

domain. In most radar systems, only a single-frequency carrier signal is modulated with a rectangular pulse of duration p seconds. The bandwidth of this modulated signal is B 1/p . If instead of a single-frequency carrier, N successive step carrier frequencies f Hz apart are modulated with the same rectangular pulse, then the waveform bandwidth becomes B = (N 1)f 1/p . Then the effective pulse duration is 1/B. In practice, step frequencies are not used for SARs. Instead, a continuous linear sweep of frequency also known as the Linear Frequency Modulation (LFM) is used [2]. Figure 4 shows the waveform of a pulsed modulated LFM signal.

Fig. 4.

Pulse modulated LFM waveform.

Fig. 2.

Crossrange and Range resolutions of the SAR.

The waveform equation, bandwidth, and the instantaneous frequency of an LFM signal is given by Eqs. 3, 4, and 5 respectively. { ( )} s(t) = cos 2 fc t + kt2 /2 (3) B = kt f (t) = fc + kt (4) (5)

Fig. 3.

Geometry of the SAR Range resolutions.

If p is the duration of one of the transmitted pulses, then the length of the area on the ground illuminated by that pulse is the range resolution and is given by Eq. 2. cp r = (2) 2 sin() Where c is the speed of light and is the look angle. Eq. 2 shows that the range resolution is independent of the range. One way to improve the range resolution (i.e. shorten r ) is to decrease the pulse duration p but this would reduce the average transmitted power which in turn would degrade the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To compensate for this loss, the peak power needs to be increased but there are limitations to this as well. Pulse compression is the technique used in Synthetic Aperture Radars to shorten the transmitted pulse p . The idea behind the pulse compression is to keep the pulse duration the same but divide it into shorter pulses, p , detectable by the signal processor. To explain how this can be achieved, it would be simpler to start from analyzing this from the frequency

Where p /2 t p /2, k is the chirp rate of the waveform, and fc is the center frequency. Using the Pulse Compression technique means that every scatterer inside along the length r in Figure 3 backscatters a different frequency. This simply means that each frequency represnts a point along r . At the receiver end, matched lters are used to extract the backscattered LFM signals from the noise and other unwanted propagation effects. B. Crossrange Resolution In Figure 5, scatterers M1 and M2 both have the same ranges but they are separated in the azimuth (parallel to the ight path) direction. Using the backscattered waves alone, the azimuth resolution is given by Eq. 6. R (6) l Where R is the range, l is the length or diameter of the antenna aperture, and is the career wavelength. Therefore, there are three ways to improve the crossrange resolution (i.e. reduce a ). Decreasing the altitude of the ying platform can be done to a certain level. In spaceborne applications, this may not even be an option since the altitude determines the velocity of the spacecraft. Increasing the frequency is an option and is often used in modern SARs but complexity of the RF system at higher frequency would eventually impose its limits as well. Finally, the physical aperture of the antenna would need to be a =

impractically very large to have a signicant contribution to the crossrange resolution. SARs exploit the motion of the platform to separate two scatterers of the same range that are inside the footprint at the same time. Scatterers M1 and M2 of Figure 5 have angular separation of 2 1 and each with radial velocities given by Eqs. 7. This leads to a Doppler frequency shift from the carrier frequency for each target velocity given by Eq. 8.

Where kr is close to 1 and is a coefcient that depends on the quality of the processing [3]. Using the Doppler frequency shift detection, the improved crossrange resolution is given by Eq. 10. kr R a = (10) 2vTe sin() Where v is the velocity of the platform. This equation shows that the best resolution is achieved when the center of the beamwidth and the target are directly pointed at each other. Another way of realizing how SARs improve the crossrange resolution is noting that multiple backscatter signals with different Doppler frequency shifts from the same scatterer is collected during the illumination time window. Using a signal processing algorithm that iterates through the power-Doppler history frequency as shown in Figure 7, the maximum received power and zero Doppler points for each target can be found to separate that target from other scatterers. Having multiple data for the same target also improves the SNR [4].

Fig. 5.

Top view of two scatterers of the same range inside the footprint.

vr1 = vs cos(1 ) (7a) vr2 = vs cos(2 ) (7b) 2vr fD = (8) It now becomes up to the smallest detectable Doppler frequency shift to determine the crossrange resolution. Figure 6 shows how a target enters the 3-dB beamwidth of the antenna and remains illuminated until it exits the beamwidth. The

Fig. 7.

Power-Doppler history plot.

C. Synthesizing Antenna Aperture In the geometry of Figure 6, the length along the azimuth direction that the target is illuminated is given by Eq. 11. Lsynth = vTe sin(synth ) (11)

Where Te is the total target illumination time and v is the velocity of the platform. Eq. 10 can be re-written as a = R kr R 2Lsynth 2Lsynth (12)

Fig. 6.

Target illumination and the synthetic aperture.

The azimuth beamwidth of an antenna is B /l. Where l is the length of the antenna aperture. From Eq. 12, it can seen that the improved resolution could have also been achieved using an antenna with aperture length of 2Lsynth . Therefore, SARs synthesize a very large antenna aperture using a small antenna aperture hence the name Synthetic Aperture Radar. R EFERENCES
[1] C. Wiley, Synthetic aperture radars, IEEE Transactions Aerospace and Electronic Systems, vol. AES-21, pp. 440, May 1985. [2] Sullivan, Roger, Radar Handbook, 3rd ed., Sec. 17.4 [3] Lacomme, Hardange, Marchias, and Normant, Air and Spaceborne Radar Systems - An Introduction, p. 235. [4] I. Skolnik, Merrillm, Introduction to Radar Systems, 3rd ed., p. 45.

Doppler frequency shifts can be found by spectral analysis using a Fourier transform. To do this, the SAR system takes a Te -second window of the illumination time and performs a FT on it. Therefore, the smallest detectable Doppler frequency is given by Eq. 9. kr (9) fD = Te