AN OPTIMAL ANTENNA PATTERN SYNTHESIS FOR ACTIVE PHASED ARRAY SAR BASED ON PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION AND ADAPTIVE WEIGHTING FACTOR

Abstract

This paper shows that an optimal antenna pattern for active phased array synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been synthesized to meet the best performances based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) and adaptively selected weighting factors. Because the antenna radiation pattern has a very close relation with the performance of an active phased array SAR system, the authors derived the multi-objective cost functions on the basis of the system performance measures such as the range-to-ambiguity ratio, noise equivalent sigma zero, and radiometric accuracy. The antenna mask templates were derived from the SAR system design parameters in order to optimize the system requirements. To efiectively minimize the cost functions and to search for the amplitude and phase excitations of an active phase array SAR antenna, the authors applied the PSO technique to SAR antenna pattern design and also carefully selected weighting factors to improve the fltness of the cost functions on the basis of the SAR performance.