An improved two-channel Synthetic Aperture Radar Ground Moving Target Indication (SAR-GMTI) method based on eigen-decomposition of the covariance matrix is investigated. Based on the joint Probability Density Function (PDF) of the Along-Track Interferometric (ATI) phase and the similarity between the two SAR complex images, a novel ellipse detector is presented and is applied to the indication of ground moving targets. We derive its statistics and analyze the performance of detection process in detail. Compared with the approach using the ATI phase, the ellipse detector has a better performance of detection in homogenous clutter. Numerical experiments on simulated data are presented to validate the improved performance of the ellipse detector with respect to the ATI phase approach. Finally, the detection capability of the proposed method is demonstrated by measured SAR data.
