Application of Apodization Filtering Sidelobe Suppressin Technique to Synthetic Aperture Radar

It is known that for Linear Frequency Modulation (LFM) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) echo signal, the obtained SAR image by 2-dimensional matched filtering has relatively high sidelobe level. Though such sidelobe can be depressed with amplitude weighting, the resolution of mainlobe will be accordingly reduced. To resolve this problem, in this paper, the apodization filtering technique is discussed and then applied to sidelobe suppression of SAR imaging with the detailed realization procedure presented. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that in comparison with amplitude weighting, this technique can preserve the resolution of original SAR imaging whilst reducing the sidelobe level. The advantage of this technique has been verified with the simulation results of SAR image in multi-object case.