As the electromagnetic environment becomes increasingly complex, a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system with wideband active transmission and reception is vulnerable to interference from devices at the same frequency. SAR interference detection using the transform domain has become a research hotspot in recent years. However, existing transform domain interference detection methods exhibit unsatisfactory performance in complex interference environments. Moreover, most of them rely on label information, while existing publicly available interference datasets are limited. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an SAR unsupervised interference detection model that combines Canny edge detection with vision transformer (CEVIT). Using a time–frequency spectrogram as input, CEVIT realizes interference detection in complex interference environments with multi-interference and multiple types of interference by means of a feature extraction module and a detection head module. To validate the performance of the proposed model, experiments are conducted on airborne SAR interference simulation data and Sentinel-1 real interference data. The experimental results show that, compared with the other object detection models, CEVIT has the best interference detection performance in a complex interference environment, and the key evaluation indexes (e.g., Recall and F1-score) are improved by nearly 20%. The detection results on the real interfered echo data have a Recall that reaches 0.8722 and an F1-score that reaches 0.9115, which are much better than those of the compared methods, and the results also indicate that the proposed model achieves good detection performance with a fast detection speed in complex interference environments, which has certain practical application value in the interference detection problem of the SAR system.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is often affected by other high-power electromagnetic devices during ground observation, which causes unintentional radio frequency interference (RFI) with the acquired echo, bringing adverse effects into data processing and image interpretation. When faced with the task of screening massive SAR data, there is an urgent need for the global perception and detection of interference. The existing RFI detection method usually only uses a single type of data for detection, ignoring the information association between the data at all levels of the real SAR product, resulting in some computational redundancy. Meanwhile, current deep learning-based algorithms are often unable to locate the range of RFI coverage in the azimuth direction. Therefore, a novel RFI processing framework from quick-looks to single-look complex (SLC) data and then to raw echo is proposed. We take the data of Sentinel-1 terrain observation with progressive scan (TOPS) mode as an example. By combining the statistics-assisted network with the sliding-window algorithm and the error-tolerant training strategy, it is possible to accurately detect and locate RFI in the quick looks of an SLC product. Then, through the analysis of the TOPSAR imaging principle, the position of the RFI in the SLC image is preliminarily confirmed. The possible distribution of the RFI in the corresponding raw echo is further inferred, which is one of the first attempts to use spaceborne SAR data to elucidate the RFI location mapping relationship between image data and raw echo. Compared with directly detecting all of the SLC data, the time for the proposed framework to determine the RFI distribution in the SLC data can be shortened by 53.526%. All the research in this paper is conducted on Sentinel-1 real data, which verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework for radio frequency signals monitoring in advanced spaceborne SAR systems.

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) significantly degrades the quality of spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, and RFI source localization is a crucial component of SAR interference mitigation. Single-station, single-channel SAR, referred to as single-channel SAR, is the most common operational mode of spaceborne SAR. However, studies on RFI source localization for this system are limited, and the localization accuracy remains low. This paper presents a method for locating the ground-based RFI source using spaceborne single-channel SAR echo data. First, matched filtering is employed to estimate the range and azimuth times of the RFI pulse-by-pulse in the SAR echo domain. A non-convex localization model using Pulse Range Difference of Arrival (PRDOA) is established based on the SAR observation geometry. Then, by applying Weighted Least Squares and Semidefinite Relaxation, the localization model is transformed into a convex optimization problem, allowing for the solution of its global optimal solution to achieve RFI source localization. Furthermore, the error analysis on the PRDOA localization model is conducted and the Cramér–Rao Lower Bound is derived. Based on the simulation platform and the SAR level-0 raw data of Gaofen-3, we conduct several verification experiments, with the Pulse Time of Arrival localization selected for comparison. The results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves localization accuracy with a hundred-meter error in azimuth and a kilometer-level total error, with the total localization errors reduced to approximately 1/4 to 1/3 of those of the Pulse Time of Arrival method.

Due to the huge differences in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image features of the same target under different observing aspects, the demand for constructing multi-aspect SAR datasets of various typical targets is becoming increasingly urgent with the expansion of SAR technology application fields. Meanwhile, multi-aspect interpolation techniques for constructing multi-aspect SAR datasets, based on electromagnetic scattering features and on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have some shortcomings that are difficult to address. The former method provide descriptions of the target scattering so overly idealized that they are not real, while the latter method suffers from incomplete amplitude information and a loss of phase information in multi-aspect interpolation results due to the SAR images input into GANs being phaseless and amplitude-quantized. In response to the above issues, this paper proposes the Multi-aspect Scattering Information Complex GAN (MS-CGAN) guided by the scattering information in observing aspects of SAR images to simulate the multi-aspect interpolation of SAR images from specific aspects. MS-CGAN provides a new approach for dataset construction and augmentation. Moreover, as a complex network, MS-CGAN does not require phase removal or amplitude quantization of the input SAR images; thus, the significant issue of the severe loss of scattering information in multi-aspect interpolation methods based on GANs is greatly addressed. In the experiments, assuming the absence of real SAR images from certain aspects, both the correlation coefficient and the phase correlation between interpolated SAR images from MS-CGAN and real SAR images achieve good results. In the case of a sampling aspect interval of 10°, the mean correlation of the amplitude and phase of the interpolated SAR images and the corresponding real SAR images both reach over 80%. In the case of a sampling aspect interval of 20°, the mean correlation of the amplitude and phase of the interpolated SAR images and the corresponding real SAR images remain above 75%. In the case of a sampling aspect interval of 30°, the mean correlation of the amplitude and phase of the interpolated SAR images and the corresponding real SAR images can reach around 70%. Energy integration curves are completed at specific aspects, demonstrating the effectiveness of the MS-CGAN multi-aspect interpolation method.