This letter analyzes the problems of imaging small and fast boats with synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which may experience severe defocusing and/or smearing. This situation is encountered, inter alia, in ocean traffic monitoring and surveillance applications where the detection of small and fast vessels is of great interest. The target modeling and impact of moving vessels in SAR images are presented and discussed using simulated results. A matched filter bank is used before applying moving target indication techniques over multichannel SAR images, refocusing the target signal in the azimuth domain and enhancing the detectability of these types of vessels.

©2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.