Extension and Evaluation of SSC for Removing Wideband RFI in SLC SAR Images

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR), as a wideband radar system, is easily contaminated by radio frequency interference (RFI), which affects the imaging quality of SAR. The subband spectral cancellation (SSC) method and its modifications utilize the SAR single-look complex (SLC) image to realize RFI extraction and mitigation by subtracting between sub-images, which are robust and efficient for engineering applications. In the past, the traditional SSC was often applied to narrowband interference (NBI) mitigation. However, when it was used for wideband interference (WBI) mitigation, it would cause the mitigated image to lose much of its useful information. In contrast, this paper proposes an improved SSC method based on successive cancellation and data accumulation (SSC-SCDA) for WBI mitigation. First, the fast Fourier transform (FFT) is used to characterize the SAR SLC data in the frequency domain, and the average range spectrum algorithm is used to detect whether there are interference components in the SAR SLC data. Then, according to the carrier frequency and bandwidth of the RFI in the frequency domain, the subbands are divided, and a cancellation strategy is formulated. Finally, based on the successive cancellation and data accumulation technology, WBIs can be removed by using only a small percentage of the clean subbands. Based on the simulated experiments, the interference mitigation performance of the proposed method is analyzed when the interference-to-signal bandwidth ratio (ISBR) varies from 20% to 80% under different signal-to-interference-to-noise ratios (SINR). The experimental results based on WBI-contaminated European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-1A SAR SLC data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in WBI mitigation.

A SAR Multiple RFI Suppression Method via Frobenius Norm and Iterative Matrix Decomposition

“…The soft threshold algorithm is preferred over the hard threshold algorithm due to its ability to mitigate additional reconstruction errors associated with complex data processing and expedite algorithm convergence [35]. Consequently, the soft threshold algorithm is employed for solving (9) to update the sparse matrix, where ζ denotes the initial threshold and γ represents the threshold attenuation parameter.…”

“…A sub-band cancellation method for narrowband RFI is proposed based on the energy difference between the sub-band containing RFI and the clean sub-band [8]. Building upon this approach, a cancellation method capable of suppressing narrowband and wideband RFI is devised by employing continuous cancellation and data accumulation methods [9]. The 2-D SPECtral ANalysis(2-D SPECAN) [10] method can be used to suppress LFM interference signals directly on SLC data.…”