A New Detection Approach for Radio Frequency Interferences Corrupting Airborne L-Band SAR Data

Identification and mitigation of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) corrupting airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data is addressed in this paper. In particular, an approach based on a two-step processing chain applied to the range-compressed (RC) SAR images is proposed and assessed to identify the RFI signals present in the data. Moreover, a simple RFI suppression procedure to be integrated in the SAR data focusing step, and based on the outputs of the presented detection strategy, is proposed as well. The overall approach is tested on real-world L-band SAR data acquired by the recently developed Italian airborne Multiband Interferometric and Polarimetric SAR (MIPS) system.