Date of Award

6-2013

Degree Name

MS in Electrical Engineering

Department/Program

Electrical Engineering

Advisor

John Saghri

Abstract

The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) algorithm processes multiple radar returns from the target space to generate a single high-resolution image. Targets moving through the target space during the capture sequence will appear distorted on the final image. In addition, there is no velocity information that is calculated as part of the processing. The objective of this thesis is to develop techniques to determine the azimuth and range velocities of moving objects in the target space in the early stages of SAR processing. The typical SAR processing steps are Range Compressed, Range Doppler, and final image generation. The range velocity of a target can be determined after the Range Compression stage, and the azimuth velocity can be determined after the Range Doppler image is created. Calculating the velocity of a target without performing all the steps of the SAR process allows such information can be obtained quicker than the final image.

This work is done as part of Cal Poly’s SAR Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) project, sponsored by Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems Division and headed by Professor John Saghri. The simulations performed as part of this thesis are done in a MATLAB simulation environment implementing a two-dimension SAR target space, first introduced in Brian Zaharris’ thesis. This work has expanded on this environment by introducing point target azimuth and range velocity detection.

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