Performance Comparison of Cognitive SAR System Concepts for Ship Detection

We present a cognitive synthetic aperture radar concept for maritime ship detection and evaluate it on high-resolution TerraSAR-X SLC spotlight data. The concept consists of a leading satellite in a wide swath mode and a following satellite illuminating locations of interest with high resolution. We compare the ship detection performance of the concept with a concept operating a single SAR sensor in stripmap mode with medium resolution. Both the stripmap and the wide swath mode are simulated from the spotlight data with low-pass filters. The cognitive SAR concept surpasses the detection performance even with a sub-optimal greedy heuristic for the crucial beam positioning task.