SAR moving targets processing for small airborne platforms

This paper presents a methodology to retrieve the full velocity vector of moving targets inducing Doppler-shifts beyond the Nyquist limit determined by the pulse repetition frequency (PRF ). The proposed approach exploits the linear dependence (not subject to PRF limitations) of the Doppler-shift with respect to the slant-range velocity, at each wavelength. By combining the developed scheme to retrieve the slant-range velocity with a methodology proposed earlier to estimate the velocity vector magnitude, the full velocity vector is unambiguously retrieved. The proposed approach is very efficient from the computational point of view and uses data from a single channel SAR channel, being therefore adequate for use in low resources platforms such as UAVs.