The thesis “Adaptive Digital Beam-Forming for High-Resolution Wide-Swath
Synthetic Aperture Radar” is a project carried out in the Microwaves and Radar Institute
(IHR) at the German Aerospace Center (DLR)
The objective of this work is to investigate the possibility of applying direction
of arrival (DOA) estimation methods to high-resolution, wide-swath Synthetic Aperture
Radar (SAR) spaceborne systems, based on receive beam steering algorithm.
In the conventional algorithm, called SCan-On-REceive (SCORE), the steering
direction of the receive pattern corresponds to the expected DOA of the actual echo,
which is computed assuming a stringent spherical Earth model. In presence of
topographic height, SCORE works under model mismatch and losses of several dBs
could be reached with respect to ideal operational conditions.
This thesis analyses the possibility to overcome SCORE loss of performance by
using a data-dependent, adaptive mechanism for receive beam steering. In particular, a
new algorithm, denoted as Adaptive Digital Beam-Forming (ADBF), is proposed. This
algorithm steers the beam based on the actual spatial distribution of the received signal
power. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by Monte Carlo
simulations and compared with that of the conventional, non-adaptive SCORE in
different operational scenarios versus the main SAR system parameters. Moreover,
based on Cramér-Rao Lower Bound analysis, the optimal performance achievable by
the adaptive approach has been evaluated and used as a benchmark on the proposed
algorith
Premi GMV en l’àmbit de la Tecnologia Espacial a la millor Tesis de Màster del Màster MINT. Projecte realitzat en col.laboració amb el centre German Aerospace Center (DLR)
