1178 IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO.
8, AUGUST 2016
Side-Lobe Reduction for Radio Frequency
Interference Suppression via Clipping
of Strong Scatterers
Yue-Li Li, Member, IEEE, Xiang-Yang Li, and Zhi-Min Zhou
Abstract—In this letter, we present a normalized least mean
square filter with clipping of strong scatterers to suppress radio
frequency interference (RFI) in low-frequency synthetic aperture
radar (SAR) systems. In this filter, the impulse responses of bright
scatterers are clipped after range compression to improve the
performance of narrow-band RFI estimation for adaptive line
enhancer. Then, the estimated RFI is subtracted from the orig-
inal echo for SAR imaging; thus, the range side-lobes of bright
scatterers are reduced successfully. This method is particularly
applicable to situations where there are bright scatterers in the
image scene. The performance for RFI suppression is investigated
by using the simulated data and the raw data as well.
Index Terms—Adaptive line enhancer (ALE), normalized least
mean square (NLMS), radio frequency interference (RFI), side-
lobe reduction, synthetic aperture radar (SAR).
I. I NTRODUCTION
A S THE very high frequency/ultrahigh frequency (VHF/
UHF) bands used by ultrawide-band (UWB) synthetic
aperture radar (SAR) systems are dense with radios, commu-
nications, and television emissions, it is necessary to remove
radio frequency interference (RFI) in UWB SAR operation.
Various techniques have been developed to suppress RFI in the
last 20 years [1]–[7]. Although the identification and mitigation
of RFI have been deeply studied in many respects, this problem
is still far from a final solution because of the complexity of
RFI environment.
The objective of RFI suppression is to remove the interfering
signals as much as possible and simultaneously minimize the
distortion of targets. Parametric methods, with an ability to
remove the narrow-band interferences without influence on the
target echoes [1], [2], generally operate by fitting RFI data to
a sinusoidal model and coherently subtracting the estimated
result. However, under dense RFI conditions, the computational
load becomes huge, and the estimated results are not satisfactory.
The most efficient nonparametric method, named linear RFI
filtering (LRF), estimates an average energy spectrum from the
Manuscript received October 25, 2015; revised February 26, 2016, May 15,
2016, and May 19, 2016; accepted May 20, 2016. Date of publication June 21,
2016; date of current version July 20, 2016. This work was supported by the
National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61302146.
The authors are with the College of Electronic Science and Engineering,
National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China, and also
with Collaborative Innovation Center of Information Sensing and Understand-
ing, Xi’an 710077, China (e-mail: liyueli4uwb@nudt.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LGRS.2016.2574908
1545-598X © 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
radar returns and removes the larger RFI spikes by spectrum
notching [3], [4]. Although the LRF method works well in
real-time applications, it cannot suppress the time-variant inter-
ference and may raise symmetric side-lobes in the range dimen-
sion with the increase of RFI density or intensity [8]. Recently,
compressive sensing that leverages the approximate sparsity of
a SAR image has been successfully used to overcome the loss
of spectral subbands because of interference, but meanwhile,
the computational complexity needs to be reduced [9].
Adaptive filtering that uses an adaptive line enhancer (ALE)
to estimate the narrow-band RFI is a class of computationally
efficient approaches with the ability to reject the time-variant
RFI. In addition, ALE based on the normalized least mean
square (NLMS) algorithm is one of the most popular methods
used in RFI suppression [10]–[12]. Unfortunately, although it
owns the capability to track the time-variant characteristics of
RFI, it introduces phase errors during filtering operations. As
a consequence, the asymmetric side-lobes of strong scatter-
ers usually overlap their neighboring weak targets after RFI
suppression. Several efforts have been made to subtract the
asymmetric side-lobes by using a second-order or third-order
ALE procedure. However, their performance is based on the
assumptions that RFI suppression has been done perfectly and
the side-lobes are negligible [10], [11], which are difficult to
fulfill and verify in practical applications.
This letter presents an approach to reduce the asymmetric
side-lobes in the range dimension in adaptive RFI suppression.
Because the accuracy of RFI estimation of ALE depends on the
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the input data, the energy of the
wide-band target echoes degrades the estimation, especially for
the cases with bright scatterers in the scene. In view of this, an
adaptive filter with clipping is proposed in this letter and applied
not only to the simulated data but also to the raw data.
This letter is organized as follows. Section II describes the
proposed approach for RFI suppression and side-lobe reduction
in UWB SAR. Simulation results and evaluations are given in
Section III. Section IV provides the conclusion.
II. NLMS A DAPTIVE F ILTERING W ITH C LIPPING
A. Analysis of the Radar Echo of UWB SAR
Suppose that a radar echo sequence d(n) of UWB SAR can
be expressed as
d(n) = rfi(n) + s(n) + v(n), n = 0, 1, . . . , N − 1 (1)
LI et al.: SIDE-LOBE REDUCTION FOR RFI SUPPRESSION VIA CLIPPING OF STRONG SCATTERERS
where s(n), rfi(n), and v(n) denote the fast time sequences of
the wide-band echo, the RFI, and the white Gaussian noise,
respectively, and N denotes the range sample size. The RFI
is independent of the wide-band echo and the white Gaussian
noise. Because the frequency spectrum of most narrow-band
RFIs is distributed in peak state in VHF/UHF band, we approxi-
mate it as the sum of multiple complex sinusoids [12]. However,
according to the analysis of raw data, the intrapulse modulation
time of RFI is around 5–10 μs [3], which is often shorter than
the duration of a fast time echo sequence. Therefore, the RFI is
slow time varying.
To suppress the narrow-band RFI, a class of filtering-based
methods uses an ALE to have a fast estimation of the interfer-
ence sequence and then subtracts it from d(n). Based on iter-
ative estimation, ALE tracks the time-variant characteristics of
RFI adaptively. However, compared with the other techniques,
adaptive filtering always leads to asymmetric side-lobes in the
range dimension [3], [10]. The reason lies in the assumption that
the wide-band target echoes are equal to the wide-band noise,
which simplifies the structure of ALE but influences the SNR of
RFI estimation. Therefore, the performance of RFI estimation
may be degraded as long as there are strong reflected signals
from the image scene. From this aspect, the performance of
ALE can be improved by minimizing the energy of s(n) in the
input sequence d(n).
A chirp-least-squares algorithm with target extraction has
been developed to improve the signal quality of RFI estimation
[1]. Its main idea is to remove the stronger targets before RFI
estimation and then estimate RFI using parametric methods.
However, it relies on a priori knowledge of the RFI environ-
ment to reduce the computational load caused by parametric
estimation.
The aforementioned idea can also be introduced into adaptive
filtering in a simplified manner. Here, we propose to clip the
strong scatterers before RFI estimation. The proposed method
makes use of the feasibility that the strong scatterers can be
identified from the background after pulse compression even
without RFI suppression. It improves the performance of ALE
by partially removing the wide-band signals in the radar echo.
For example, in a linear frequency modulated (LFM) radar, the
wide-band signal sequence s(n) of the reflected targets can
be match filtered by a reference sequence with the conjugate
phase of transmitted signal to attain range compression. After
range compression, the energy of s(n) is compressed in the
time domain, whereas the energy of the narrow-band RFI is
still dispersed. The impulse responses of the strong scatterers
may form spikes in the range compression domain. Therefore,
by clipping the spikes, we can improve the SNR of the sequence
d (n), which is the modified input sequence in the structure of
the proposed filter, as illustrated in Fig. 1.
B. Structure of Adaptive Filter With Clipping
The structure of the proposed filter is illustrated in Fig. 1,
where the clipping is carried out in the time domain after
range compression. During the clipping operation, a detec-
tor is employed to identify the largest scatterers. The real
and imaginary parts of c(n), which is the range-compressed
1179
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the adaptive filter with clipping of strong scatterers.
sequence, are independent and identically distributed non-
Gaussian processes with unknown amplitude and phase. How-
ever, detection of spikes can be experimentally simplified based
on the Neyman–Pearson criterion [13]. Therefore, the clipping
threshold in terms of pFA is

Tc = σn − ln pFA . (2)
That is to say, given a false alarm probability pFA , the threshold
is set to be proportional to the standard deviation σn of the
range-compressed sequence.
The clipping approach substitutes sequence c (n) for c(n) as
follows:

 ρc(n) |c(n)| > Tc
c (n) = (3)
c(n) others
where 0 ≤ ρ and ρ  1. For a strong scatterer that exceeds the
threshold, the phase is preserved, but the intensity is reduced
after clipping. After the largest scatterers are clipped, c (n) is
range decompressed by multiplying a filter with the same phase
of the transmit signal [14], thus reconstructing a sequence d (n)
for RFI estimation. Given that the group/phase delay introduced
by the compression filter can be completely compensated by the
decompression filter, the RFI is not affected by clipping.
It is noticed that RFI extraction is processed based on the
sequence d (n), which contains a higher SNR, so that the bias
of RFI estimation can be reduced. Therefore, the mean-squared
error introduced by the clipping operation can be suboptimally
minimized compared to the conventional adaptive filters.
After range decompression, the sequence d (n) is used to es-
timate the RFI sequence. As can be seen in Fig. 1, the sequence
d (n) is delayed for Δ samples to generate a reference sequence
x(n). Here, Δ must be kept as small as possible to obtain
better estimates of the narrow-band interference sequence; at
the same time, it should be sufficiently large so that the wide-
band noise and the residual signal sequence are uncorrelated.
Xn (k), the reference signal vector of the adaptive filter, is
defined as follows:
Xn (k) = [x(n) x(n−1), . . . , x(n−M +1)]T 0 ≤ k ≤ M −1
(4)
where k is the order.
1180
TABLE I
S IMULATION PARAMETERS OF UWB SAR
Subsequently, an estimate of the interference sequence is
formed by passing Xn (k) through an ALE with the M -by-1
coefficients Wn (k). The output signal y(n) is an estimate of
rfi(n), and the error e (n) = d (n) − WnH (k)Xn (k) can be
used to modify the filter coefficients Wn (k). Hence, according
to the NLMS algorithm, the vector Wn+1 (k) can be simply
defined as in [15]
μe∗ (n)x(n)
Wn+1 (k) = Wn (k) + 0≤k ≤M −1 (5)
a + x(n)2
where a denotes a small positive constant to avoid overflow of
the division operation, μ denotes the step-size parameter, and
the superscript ∗ represents the conjugate transpose. Finally, the
ALE output sequence y(n) is subtracted from the original input
sequence d(n), thus generating an estimate sequence e(n) for
the wide-band signal and noise sequence, as illustrated in Fig. 1.
Let ΓM be the correlation matrix of the input sequence
x(n), and then, the excess mean-squared error produced by the
NLMS algorithm can be primarily determined by the largest
eigenvalue of ΓM even as the convergence rate is limited by
the smallest eigenvalue of ΓM . The convergence rate and the
stability of the LMS filter have been investigated, and the results
indicate that the performance of the LMS filter is governed by
the choice of the step size μ [15]. In practice, to obtain fast
convergence and stable minimum mean-square error, a choice
of μ < 1/γxx(0) is usually made, where γxx (0) is the power
of the input sequence [10]. However, such a step size may get a
very slow convergence rate in a dense RFI environment because
γxx (0) may be much larger than the largest eigenvalue λmax .
Hence, μ < 2/λmax is a more reasonable choice for adaptive
filtering in practical RFI suppression.
III. S IMULATION AND E VALUATION
In this section, some simulation results are presented to
demonstrate and evaluate the proposed method. The simulated
data and the raw data of a UWB SAR system are used in the
experiments. Three methods, including the LRF, the NLMS
filter, and the NLMS filter with clipping (NLMSC), are used
to process the data. The radar transmits LFM signals, and the
data are simulated according to the system parameters given in
Table I. The NLMS filters are employed with the order M = 100
and the delay Δ = 1. The step size μ is selected according to
λmax of the correlation matrix ΓM . The false alarm probability
pFA to determine the threshold is set to 10−9 .
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO. 8, AUGUST 2016
Fig. 2. PSD of the simulated radar echo, the RFI, the estimated RFI, and the
echo output by adaptive filters. (a) PSD of the original RFI (black), the RFI
estimated by NLMS (blue), and the RFI estimated by NLMSC (red). (b) PSD
of the simulated radar echo (black), the echo output by NLMS (blue), and the
echo output by NLMSC (red).
A. Effects of the Wide-Band Signals on the Narrow-Band
RFI Estimation
At first, the influence of the wide-band signal on the sinu-
soidal interference estimation is investigated and presented. To
simulate a dense narrow-band RFI environment, the RFI signal
is approximated as the sum of 16 complex sinusoidal compo-
nents. In simulation, a point target is located at the center of the
image scene. The power spectral density (PSD) of the original
RFI and the estimated RFIs is shown in Fig. 2(a). The signal-
to-interference ratio (SIR) of the radar echo is set to −10 dB,
and its PSD is the black envelope illustrated in Fig. 2(b).
Although the traditional ALE has an ability to extract the
narrow-band RFI, the performance is impaired by the wide-
band signal energy. As is evident in Fig. 2(a), in comparison
with the RFI estimates of the NLMS filter, the envelope of the
RFI estimates of the NLMSC filter is more identical with that
of the original RFI. In Fig. 2(b), the PSD of the output signal of
the NLMS filter is deeply notched; on the contrary, the PSD of
the output signal of the NLMSC filter has a much smoother
envelope, which indicates a smaller energy loss. Therefore,
the simulation results indicate that the clipping operation can
reduce the energy loss of the wide-band signal effectively.
B. Simulation of RFI Suppression Using Synthetic Data
In the following, the synthetic echo data are used to investi-
gate the performance of the NLMSC method.
The RFI data were recorded with a sampling rate of 300 MHz
by an 8-b digitizer in a UWB SAR deployed on a small aircraft
“Y-12” using the listen-only strip-mode. The LFM signal of a
point target is added to the resampled raw RFI data to generate
LI et al.: SIDE-LOBE REDUCTION FOR RFI SUPPRESSION VIA CLIPPING OF STRONG SCATTERERS
Fig. 3. Spectrum of the raw RFI data.
Fig. 4. Comparison of the impulse responses in the range dimension after RFI
suppression via three methods. (SIR = −15 dB).
the synthetic data, and the SIR is set to −15 dB. Fig. 3 illustrates
the spectrum of an RFI sequence. As can be seen, most of the
RFIs are narrow-band interferences, and the RFIs are densely
dispersed in the radar spectrum. The simulated radar echoes
are generated along a linear aperture with 6100 samples based
on the parameters given in Table I. The nonlinear chirp-scaling
algorithm is used to attain the SAR images.
Fig. 4 shows the impulse responses in the range dimension
generated by the LRF, NLMS, and NLMSC filters after image
formation. Notably, the largest side-lobe in the range dimension
for the NLMS filtering is raised to about −5.2 dB with respect
to the main lobe, whereas that for the NLMSC method is only
about −15.6 dB. In addition, the largest side-lobe in the range
dimension generated by the LRF method is about −10.7 dB
with respect to the main lobe. The simulation results validate
the ability of side-lobe reduction of the proposed method.
To assess the quality of each SAR image, several image
characteristics are measured, including the peak side-lobe ratio
(PSLR) in the range and azimuth directions, the 2-D integrated
side-lobe ratio (2D-ISLR), and the image SIR (ISIR). The quan-
titative results are shown in Table II. Initially, all of the mea-
sured results obtained by the NLMSC and the LRF algorithms
are better than those obtained by the NLMS algorithm. More-
over, the 2D-ISLR obtained by the NLMSC method is about
−10.06 dB, which is much better than the −6.93 dB obtained
by the LRF method because of the raised side-lobes in far range
cells. Moreover, the ISIR obtained by the LRF is 26.54 dB,
whereas that obtained by the NLMSC method is 29.66 dB.
To sum up, according to the simulation results, the NLMSC
1181
TABLE II
C OMPARISON OF I MAGE P ERFORMANCE FOR D IFFERENT
A LGORITHMS (W ITHOUT W EIGHTING W INDOW )
Fig. 5. Comparison of images in SAR RFI suppression via three methods.
(a) Scatterer 1 obtained via LRF. (b) Scatterer 2 obtained via LRF. (c) Scatterer 1
obtained via the NLMS filter. (d) Scatterer 2 obtained via the NLMS filter.
(e) Scatterer 1 obtained via the NLMSC filter. (f) Scatterer 2 obtained via the
NLMSC filter.
method shows an improvement in RFI suppression over the
other two methods.
C. Application of RFI Suppression to SAR Data
Finally, the performance of the proposed method is also eval-
uated using the raw UWB SAR data. The data were collected by
the SAR system mentioned in Section II. The flight experiments
were conducted in Guizhou Province in China in 2009. In the
image scene, there are two dihedral-corner scatterers formed by
man-made structures, of which one is a wall of a building and
the other is a ditch near a road. The RFIs are suppressed using
the LRF, NLMS, and NLMSC methods, respectively. Fig. 5(a)
and (b) illustrates the images of the two scatterers obtained
via the LRF method. Although the image background is clear,
the symmetric side-lobes of the two scatterers are visible. The
images filtered via the NLMS method are illustrated in Fig. 5(c)
and (d), where there are large side-lobes at the left side of the
1182
Fig. 6. Comparison of the cross sections of scatterer 2 in the range dimension
obtained via three methods.
two bright scatterers. Moreover, the background is blurred by
the residual RFI. Fig. 5(e) and (f) illustrates the images obtained
via the NLMSC filter. Obviously, the asymmetric side-lobes in
the range dimension have been suppressed, and the background
clutter has been rejected too. Fig. 6 illustrates the cross sections
of scatterer 2 in the range dimension obtained by three methods.
Obviously, the NLMSC filter offers an advantage for side-lobe
reduction over the traditional methods. The experimental results
suggest that the elimination of the energy of bright scatterers in
narrow-band RFI estimation is helpful for side-lobe reduction
in adaptive RFI suppression.
It is also noticed that the proposed algorithm is very suitable
for imaging scenes where there are bright scatterers. In the
absence of bright scatterers, the traditional adaptive filters pre-
sumably work well anyway, and so, clipping is not necessary.
Therefore, it is feasible to remove the high side-lobes of the
dihedral-corner reflectors formed by man-made structures in
RFI suppression.
IV. C ONCLUSION
In summary, an adaptive RFI filtering with clipping has
been presented, and the performance of side-lobe reduction is
demonstrated in this letter. To clip the energy of bright scatter-
ers before estimating the unknown narrow-band interferences,
the spectrum notching is minimized, and subsequently, the side-
lobes in the range dimension can be reduced almost completely.
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO. 8, AUGUST 2016
As pulse compression and decompression are processed using
the fast Fourier transform, the increased computational load
can be ignored. Furthermore, this technique is phase preserving
for SAR imaging so that the images can be used for coherent
change detection and interferometry.
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