Abstract A novel optimal time selection method for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data processing via the expectation‐maximization (EM) algorithm is proposed, which can reduce the computational complexity and improve the image quality simultaneously. First, the Doppler frequency feature after the SAR processing is analyzed from the point of probability. Then, the Doppler frequency is modelled as the Gaussian mixture model (GMM), and the issue of optimal time selection can be implemented by the parameter estimation of GMM. The results of simulated and real measured data are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.