Experimental Demonstration of Staggered Ambiguous SAR Mode for Ship Monitoring with TerraSAR-X

Maritime surveillance using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) calls for both wide swath and high resolution. This allows frequent monitoring of large areas with high detection probability and low false alarm rate. Conventional SAR modes are, however, limited in that a wide swath can only be imaged at the expense of a reduced azimuth resolution. Ambiguous SAR modes, based on low pulse repetition frequency or continuous variation of short pulse repetition intervals (staggered ambiguous mode), overcome this limitation and allow imaging a wide swath with high resolution for specific ship monitoring applications without the need for digital beamforming or multiple receive apertures. This paper reports on the demonstration of the staggered ambiguous mode via an experimental acquisition with the TerraSAR-X satellite over the North Sea. In spite of technical limitations in the SAR instrument, a ground range swath of 110 km was imaged with an azimuth resolution of 2.2 m, i.e., with a resolution improvement of a factor of eight with respect to TerraSAR-X ScanSAR mode. Despite the higher disturbance level resulting from the presence of range ambiguities of the sea clutter a detection probability higher than 0.8 was achieved for small ships of 21 m × 6 m size. Range ambiguities of the ships were furthermore identified based on their position and signature. The detected ships were validated using maritime positioning data from their automatic identification system. These results motivate the adoption of ambiguous SAR modes in existing and future SAR systems and missions