Shadow Spatiotemporal Track-Before-Detect Approach for Distributed UAV-Borne Video SAR

Shadow detection has become a key technology for ground-based moving target indication in video synthetic aperture radar (SAR). However, single-platform video SAR faces the issue of moving-target shadows being occluded. This paper proposes a new dynamic programming-based spatiotemporal track-before-detect (DP-ST-TBD) algorithm for moving-target shadow indication based on a distributed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-borne video SAR system. First, this approach establishes a spatiotemporal cooperative shadow detection model, which extends the temporal accumulation of traditional DP-TBD to spatiotemporal accumulation by state temporal transition and spatial mapping. Second, an adaptive state transition method is proposed to address the challenge in which the fixed-state transition of traditional DP-TBD struggles with maneuvering target detection. It utilizes target’s Doppler features from heterogeneous-view range-Doppler (RD) spectra to assist in target’s shadow search within the image domain. Finally, a state shrinking–sparseness strategy is used to reduce the computational burden caused by dense states in spatiotemporal search; thus, multi-platform, multi-frame accumulation of moving-target shadows can be realized based on sparse states. The comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed DP-ST-TBD improves shadow-detection performance through heterogeneous-view measurements while reducing the required number of frames for reliable detection compared to the conventional two-step detection method (single-platform shadow detection followed by multi-platform track fusion).