IEEE AESS VIC Seminar – Toward Onboard RFI Detection and Mitigation in Spaceborne SAR: Challenges, Opportunities, and Emerging Solutions

Title: Toward Onboard RFI Detection and Mitigation in Spaceborne SAR: Challenges, Opportunities, and Emerging Solutions
Speaker: Dr Nermine Hendy, RMIT University
When: Friday, 24 April 2026 – 14:00 to 15:00.
Where: RMIT Lecture Theatre B012.Level 05. Room-002 (Hybrid)
Abstract
Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is increasingly affected by radio frequency interference (RFI) due to growing spectrum congestion and the proliferation of emitters across shared and adjacent bands. Although substantial progress has been made in modelling, detecting, and mitigating RFI on the ground after data downlink, this conventional workflow can be inefficient for time-critical and resource-constrained missions, while also limiting opportunities for adaptive onboard sensing.
This talk presents a systems-level perspective on RFI resilience in spaceborne SAR. It begins with a concise overview of RFI phenomenology in SAR, including modelling, detection, and mitigation in both raw and focused data. It then examines the practical limitations of ground-based post-processing and contrasts them with the potential benefits of onboard detection and mitigation, particularly for early disaster monitoring, rapid vessel detection, improved mission autonomy, and reduced transmission of corrupted or low-value data. The talk will discuss candidate onboard processing pathways, including raw-data-domain processing, FPGA-accelerated architectures, and edge-AI approaches, together with system constraints such as power, latency, hardware complexity, and information leakage risks, including side-channel considerations. Finally, it will highlight emerging directions such as neuromorphic sensing and other unconventional computing paradigms as possible long-term enablers of intelligent onboard SAR payloads.
Bio
Dr Nermine Hendy (Senior Member, IEEE) is a Research Fellow at RMIT University, Australia. She received the B.Eng. (Hons.) degree in 2003 and the M.S. degree in 2013 in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from RMIT University in 2025.
Her research spans spaceborne SAR interference modelling and mitigation, remote sensing, satellite communications, RF sensing, signal processing, machine and deep learning, geolocation and emitter fingerprinting, optical communication, and neuromorphic systems. She has contributed to a range of defence-aligned and industry-linked projects in collaboration with SmartSat CRC, ESA Phi-lab, DLR, DSTG, and ONI.
Dr Hendy’s work focuses on resilient sensing and communication systems, with particular emphasis on RF interference awareness, intelligent onboard processing, and next-generation space-system architectures. Her contributions include the development of SEMUS, an open-source RF-level SAR emulator for interference modelling in spaceborne applications, as well as research on RFI detection, adaptive mitigation, and signal reconstruction in raw SAR data. More broadly, her recent work has expanded into satellite-based RF geolocation, interference-aware satellite communications, and covert optical communication using neuromorphic receivers.
Co-sponsored by: RMIT University
Speaker(s): Nermine Hendy
Room: 002, Bldg: 12, 124 La Trobe st, Level 05, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 3000, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/553655