Evaluation of classification performance for randomly dithered carrier centre frequency in SAR systems

It has been shown that dithering between carrier centre frequencies results in enhanced slant range resolution, whilst maintaining the same analog to digital converter bandwidth and data storage size. There is a corresponding degradation in the image sidelobe levels. Simulations using a simple classifier are presented to determine the effect on classification performance of resolution and of side-lobe noise. Under the assumptions for target types the dithering the carrier centre frequency enhances the classification performance for targets typically 5 dB above the average image intensity.<>