Statistical Synthesis and Analysis of Optimal Radar Imaging Algorithm for LFM-CW SAR

This paper presents a statistically grounded algorithm for surface imaging with linear frequency-modulated continuous wave synthetic aperture radar. The approach is based on the maximum likelihood principle, where solving the optimization problem naturally leads to the introduction of a spectral decorrelation filter. The proposed method increases the effective number of statistically independent samples, reduces speckle, and improves the accuracy of radar cross section estimation. Simulation experiments demonstrate consistent advantages over classical SAR processing: the proposed method achieves up to a 21% improvement in feature similarity metrics and an average 4% improvement across standard quantitative image quality measures.