Onboard Radar Processing Framework for Maritime Surveillance with a High-Altitude Platform

This paper presents an overview of an onboard maritime surveillance radar processing framework for stratospheric high-altitude platforms (HAP). It is suited for DLR’s compact multichannel HAPSAR radar sensor envisioned as a payload for the DLR HAP. It enables ship detection and tracking with long observation times, high-resolution image sequence generation, and estimation of ship dimensions and moving direction. Furthermore, by leveraging parallel processing, the framework achieves onboard processing with reduced computational load, enhancing processing efficiency. Experimental radar data from DLR’s DBFSAR airborne radar system and the TerraSAR-X satellite validate the framework as a proof of concept.