Title:Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar Acquisition Modes for Maritime Surveillance 
Speaker:Prof. Gerardo Di Martino
Affiliation:University of Naples Federico II

Abstract:Sea monitoring and surveillance via synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is gaining an increasing interest, due to its importance in maritime traffic, border, and fisheries control, and search and rescue operations. This kind of applications call for both wide coverage and high resolution, thus also implying a huge amount of data to be stored and processed. Therefore, methods to extend the size of the range swath of SAR systems, without spatial resolution loss, and techniques able to reduce the amount of data are both of great interest in this context. Accordingly, in recent years, different techniques have been proposed with the aim of increasing coverage: array beamforming, staggered SAR, multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) SAR, and SAR constellations. At the same time, some techniques to reduce data amount have been also proposed, such as onboard presumming and/or prefiltering techniques, which, however, imply a resolution loss, and, more recently, compressive sensing to focus sparse targets, allowing for a reduction of data amount, possibly at the expense of a significant complication of the processing. Actually, a simple way to reduce the data amount and, at the same time, extend the range swath does exist and consists in reducing the pulse repetition frequency (PRF). However, it is well known that, unfortunately, if the PRF is reduced to values lower than the Nyquist rate, azimuth ambiguity will appear. Nevertheless, special acquisition modes based on the use of sub-Nyquist, possibly coprime, PRFs have been proposed for ship detection applications.

Starting from the definition of the specific requirements of maritime surveillance, the tutorial will present the main advanced SAR acquisition modes developed in recent years for this kind of applications. Special attention will be paid to those acquisition modes whose actual performance can be predicted using available SAR data acquired with traditional modes.

Biograph:

Gerardo Di Martino received the Laurea degree (cum laude) in telecommunication engineering and the Ph.D. degree in electronic and telecommunication engineering both from the University Federico II, Naples, Italy, in 2005 and 2009, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor of Electromagnetics with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the University of Naples Federico II. Since 2022 he holds the Italian National Scientific Habilitation as Full Professor of Electromagnetics. He has published more than 150 papers, with about 50 published on top-tier international refereed journals. His research interests include microwave remote sensing and electromagnetics, with focus on electromagnetic scattering from natural surfaces and urban areas, SAR signal processing and simulation, information retrieval from SAR data, and electromagnetic propagation in urban areas. Prof. Di Martino is the founding Lead Editor of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Section within IEEE Access and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics on Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and an ex-officio member of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Administrative Committee.