Phase-based processing for synthetic aperture applications

A phase-based processing technique is presented in this paper. In certain synthetic aperture applications, such as the ground probing radar, wide-band radar signals were utilized to detect the presence of targets. In these applications, amplitude information plays the major role at the signal processing stage because it seems less suffered from the complex environment. However, the phase of the echoes can also provide some useful information for the detection or location of targets. This paper attempts to use the phase information to provide a graphical perspective for the synthetic aperture application. Short-time Fourier transform (STFT) was applied to analyze the phase-varying echo signals, the position-varying properties of target echoes can then be expanded on the position-frequency plane. The results show that the phase-based processing technique may be a promising approach to embedded targets detection and location.