This article presents a fast back-projection (BP) algorithm based on subaperture (SA) image coherent combination in a downsampled Cartesian coordinate grid for high squint diving terrain observation by progressive scans (HSD-TOPS) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ground plane imaging. A two-step spectrum compression (SC) method is proposed to coherently combine the aliasing SA images by exploiting the relationship between the wavenumber and the image frequency. The first-step SC is introduced to align the spectrum support region centers. The second-step SC effectively corrects the space-variant spectrum inclination. The proposed algorithm does not need interpolation in the process of image combination, which ensures the accuracy and the efficiency of the algorithm. Furthermore, the SC method is well-modified to suppress the sidelobes of the focused image. Simulation and measured data processing verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The water body detection in high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is a challenging task due to the changing interference caused by multiple imaging conditions and complex land backgrounds. Inspired by the excellent adaptability of deep neural networks (DNNs) and the structured modeling capabilities of probabilistic graphical models, the cascaded fully-convolutional network (CFCN) is proposed to improve the performance of water body detection in high-resolution SAR images. First, for the resolution loss caused by convolutions with large stride in traditional convolutional neural network (CNN), the fully-convolutional upsampling pyramid networks (UPNs) are proposed to suppress this loss and realize pixel-wise water body detection. Then considering blurred water boundary, the fully-convolutional conditional random fields (FC-CRFs) are introduced to UPNs, which reduce computational complexity and lead to the automatic learning of Gaussian kernels in CRFs and the higher boundary accuracy. Furthermore, to eliminate the inefficient training caused by imbalanced categorical distribution in the training data set, a novel variable focal loss (VFL) function is proposed, which replaces the constant weighting factor of focal loss with the frequency-dependent factor. The proposed methods can not only improve the pixel accuracy and boundary accuracy but also perform well in detection robustness and speed. Results of GaoFen-3 SAR images are presented to validate the proposed approaches.

For the ultrahigh-resolution airborne stepped-frequency synthetic aperture radar, very large synthetic bandwidth and very long integration time may lead to a 2-D space-variant (SV) motion error when the aircraft flies off the ideally straight trajectory due to the atmospheric turbulence. This new type of error complicates the motion estimation and motion compensation (MOCO). For the motion estimation, we present a jointly 2-D SV motion error estimation method to simultaneously consider the range-variant motion error and the azimuth-variant motion error. For the MOCO, we propose a 2-D SV-MOCO method. The method is implemented through three processing steps: 1) two-step MOCO for the space-invariant motion error and the range-variant phase error; 2) range block-based chirp-z transform (CZT) for the range-variant envelope error; and 3) range block division for the range-dependent azimuth-variant phase error based on the azimuth subaperture method. Finally, processing of simulated data and real data validates the proposed methods.

The microwave photonic (MWP) radar technique is capable of providing ultrawide frequency bandwidth waveforms to generate ultrahigh-resolution (UHR) inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imagery. Nevertheless, conventional ISAR imaging algorithms have limitations in focusing UHR MWP-ISAR imagery, where high-precision high-order range cell migration (RCM) and phase correction are crucially necessary. In this article, a UHR MWP-ISAR imaging algorithm integrating rotation estimation and high-order motion terms compensation is proposed. By establishing the relationship between parametric ISAR rotation model and high-order motion terms, an average range profile sharpness maximization (ARPSM) is developed to obtain rotation velocity by using nonuniform fast Fourier transform (NUFFT). Second-order range-dependent RCM is corrected with parametric compensation model by using the rotation velocity estimation. Furthermore, the spatial-variant high-order phase error is extracted to compensation by the entire image sharpness maximization (EISM). A new imaging framework is established with two one-dimensional (1-D) parameter estimations: ARPSM and EISM. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional ISAR imaging strategies in high-order RCM correction and azimuth focusing performance.

In recent years, terahertz imaging systems and techniques have been developed and have gradually become a leading frontier field. With the advantages of low radiation and clothing-penetrable, terahertz imaging technology has been widely used for the detection of concealed weapons or other contraband carried on personnel at airports and other secure locations. This paper aims to detect these concealed items with deep learning method for its well detection performance and real-time detection speed. Based on the analysis of the characteristics of terahertz images, an effective detection system is proposed in this paper. First, a lots of terahertz images are collected and labeled as the standard data format. Secondly, this paper establishes the terahertz classification dataset and proposes a classification method based on transfer learning. Then considering the special distribution of terahertz image, an improved faster region-based convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN) method based on threshold segmentation is proposed for detecting human body and other objects independently. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method for terahertz image detection.

The motion compensation (MOCO) for the airborne SAR with ultrahigh resolution and wide swath is required to consider the range-dependent (RD) phase error. The RD phase error may cause an RD residual-range cell migration (RCM) after the correction of RCM, which can degrade the performance of phase gradient autofocus (PGA) when estimating the phase error. In addition, because the PGA estimation is based on the strong scattering point, it may wrongly estimate the phase error for some observation scenes without strong scattering point. Alternatively, to take into account the above two problems, we study a MOCO algorithm based on two-step accuracy improvement. In the algorithm, the first step is to estimate and correct the RD residual-RCM and thus improves the accuracy of PGA. The second step is to develop a prior-information-based-weighted least square (PI-WLS) to further improve the accuracy of RD phase error estimation. Processing of airborne real data validates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.