Ground moving target indication using an InSAR system with a hybrid baseline

In this letter, a two-channel airborne experimental interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) designed for terrain height estimation is exploited to acquire the ability of ground moving target indication (GMTI). Due to the hybrid baseline of this system, the interferometric phase changes with the target motion as well as the terrain height. The fluctuation of the interferometric phase worsens the performance of the clutter suppression and the radial velocity estimation. In order to resolve this problem, a GMTI method with three steps is proposed. After two steps are used to eliminate the local flat-Earth phase and the cross-track interferometric phase of the scene, respectively, an adaptive filtering method is used to suppress the stationary clutter with the benefit of calibrating the sensor responses. A conventional constant false alarm rate detector is then used to indicate the moving targets. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated with real data collected using an experimental airborne InSAR system.