Imaging Of Dynamic Maritime Scenes Using Multi-Channel Sar

This paper describes a unique, multi-channel synthetic aperture radar (MSAR) designed for maritime remote sensing and surveillance research. The X-band system supports two simultaneous transmit channels, excited by arbitrary waveforms, and four simultaneous receive channels, thereby allowing full multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) modes. The system antennas are readily reconfigurable to support both along-track and cross-track phase center displacements as well as polarimetric operation. In addition, receive switching is available to provide as many as 32 along-track phase centers. This paper describes the hardware and presents results that illustrate how the along-track phase centers can be used to provide detailed motion measurements across dynamic maritime scenes, using either the Velocity SAR algorithm or a new multi-channel interferometric approach. Imagery recently collected using a combined along-track/cross-track MIMO mode is also presented. The simultaneous velocity and height information provided by this configuration offers new approaches to ocean remote sensing.