Ground Moving Target Indication Based on Optical Flow in Single-Channel SAR

An algorithm based on optical flow is proposed to detect a ground moving target via the single-channel synthetic aperture radar. First, the signal models of uniform moving targets are established and classified into three types. Next, the Doppler spectrum is divided to generate a multilook image sequence. Then, the motion feature of a moving target response is described in the image sequence, in which the optical flow is introduced to realize the moving target detection. The detection results of real moving targets are obtained after the false alarm elimination based on the response motion relevance. This algorithm has a large range of detectable velocity and can even be applied to detect the moving targets with acceleration. In addition, compared with constant false alarm rate method, the optical flow has a better anti-interference performance against the strong static scatters. Finally, some numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.