An adaptive filtering approach to spectral estimation and SAR imaging

We present an adaptive FIR filtering approach, which is referred to as the amplitude and phase estimation of a sinusoid (APES), for complex spectral estimation. We compare the APES algorithm with other FIR filtering approaches including the Welch (1967) and Capon (1969) methods. We also describe how to apply the FIR filtering approaches to target range signature estimation and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. We show via both numerical and experimental examples that the adaptive FIR filtering approaches such as Capon and APES can yield more accurate spectral estimates with much lower sidelobes and narrower spectral peaks than the FFT method, which is also a special case of the FIR filtering approach. We show that although the APES algorithm yields somewhat wider spectral peaks than the Capon method, the former gives more accurate overall spectral estimates and SAR images than the latter and the FFT method.