Focus of attention for millimeter and ultra wideband synthetic aperture radar imagery

The major goal of this research is to develop efficient detectors for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, exploiting the reflectivity characteristics of targets in different radar types. Target detection is a signal processing problem whereby one attempts to detect a stationary target embedded in background clutter while minimizing the false alarm probability. In radar signal processing, the better resolution provided by the Millimeter Wave (MMW) SAR enhances the detectability of small targets. As radar technology evolves, the newly developed Ultra Wideband (UWB) SAR provides better penetration capabilities to locate concealed targets in foliage.; In this thesis we demonstrate that local intensity kernel tests can be formulated based on the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), while preserving constant false alarm rate (CFAR) characteristics. Both the widely used two-parameter CFAR and the $g$-CFAR can be viewed as special cases of the local intensity tests with different intensity kernels. It is demonstrated that the first-order Gamma kernel is a good approximation for the principal eigenvector of the projected radial intensity of targets, which provides the optimal matching intensity kernel. This also explains the better performance of the $g$-CFAR detector over the two parameter CFAR detector.; We also developed different CFAR subspace detectors for UWB images, utilizing a Laguerre function subspace. The driven response produced by natural clutter degrades the performance of these subspace detectors. In addition to the driven response, the distinguishing feature of metallic targets in UWB is the resonance response. Therefore, we further propose a two-stage detection scheme: $g$-CFAR detector followed by the quadratic Laguerre discriminator (QLD). We evaluate every detector and discriminator using ROC curves in a large area (about 2 km2) of imagery. The combined $g$-CFAR and quadratic Laguerre discriminator improve the simple Laguerre subspace detector more than one hundred fold for a perfect detection rate (P_d = 1).