Two-Dimensional Frequency Modulation Method in Synthetic Aperture Radar Scene Simulator Design

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 PhD student, Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Iran

2 Associate Professor, Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Iran

Abstract

Hardware in the loop simulation has been proven to be a promising method for testing and evaluating radar systems to overcome difficulties caused by the outfield test. Efficiently generating echo signals in the simulation process is crucial, especially for large extended scenes, highlighting the importance of the simulator design. This paper proposes a novel echo signal generation method for SAR scene simulator design based on a two-dimensional frequency modulation method. The SAR raw signal is captured by the simulator and transmitted back efficiently after an appropriate frequency modulation in both range and azimuth directions. The echo components are created according to the modulation signal of range and azimuth using a direct digital synthesizer and a direct digital chirp synthesizer, respectively. The main focus is on reflecting the functional characteristics of the real scene in the simulation process. The frequency components are related to the spatial positions of the scene components and other kinematic parameters. The modulation signals can be implemented using a single synthesizer or multiple ones to avoid the spurious components. The final echo signal is generated by the multiplication of the SAR transmitted signal and the modulation ones. The performance of the proposed method can be evaluated by applying Conventional SAR signal processing algorithms. The final simulation results on a synthesized and a real SAR template indicate that, compared to the conventional method, without allocating an individual storage resource to each scattering point, the proposed solution can produce whole scene components with an acceptable accuracy, while achieving SSIM and PSNR image quality metrics of 0.5534 and 15.2282, respectively. Furthermore, compared to the other existing methods, the proposed solution can handle the extended scene simulation with the minimum storage resources at the cost of a slight final image quality reduction.

Keywords

Radar
Volume 11, Issue 2
Autumn and Winter
January 2024

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History

  • Receive Date: 30 June 2023
  • Revise Date: 13 October 2023
  • Accept Date: 04 November 2023
  • Publish Date: 22 December 2023

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