NOVEL APPROACH BASED ON DERAMPING TECHNIQUE FOR SQUINTED SLIDING SPOTLIGHT SAR IMAGING

This paper investigates a novel approach based on the deramping technique for squinted sliding spotlight Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging to resolve the azimuth spectrum aliasing problem. First of all, the properties of the azimuth spectrum and the squint angle impacts on the azimuth spectrum aliasing problem are analyzed. Based on the analysis result, an operation of filtering is added to the azimuth preprocessing step of traditional Two-Step Focusing Approach (TSPA) to resolve the azimuth folding problem and remove the influence of the squint angle on the azimuth spectrum aliasing problem. Then, a modified Range Migration Algorithm (RMA) is performed to obtain the precise focused image. Furthermore, the focused SAR image folding problem of traditional TSPA is illuminated in this paper. An azimuth post-processing step is proposed to unfold the aliased SAR image. Simulation experiment results prove that the proposed approach can solve the spectrum aliasing problem and process squinted sliding spotlight data efficiently.

Resolution analysis of GEO spaceborne-airborne bistatic SAR based on sliding spotlight mode

For a synthetic aperture radar（SAR） system mounted on a geostationary Earth orbit（GEO） satellite, the track can be curvilinear. Thus, a bistatic SAR system based up on geostationary transmitter and ＂receive-only＂ SAR system onboard airplanes, namely GEO spaceborne-airborne bistatic（GEO SA-Bi SAR）, is significantly different from the traditional bistatic SAR. This paper mainly studies the resolution characteristic of the sliding spotlight GEO SA-Bi SAR system. Firstly, the common azimuth coverage and coherent accumulated time are theoretically analyzed in detail. Then,based on the gradient method, the accurate two dimensional resolution of a GEO SA-Bi SAR system is analytically calculated. Finally, the simulation data show the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed resolution analysis method.

An extended chirp scaling algorithm for spaceborne sliding spotlight synthetic aperture radar imaging

A system impulse response with low sidelobes is critical in synthetic aperture radar（SAR） images because sidelobes contribute to noise and interfere with nearby scatterers. However,the conventional tricks of sidelobe suppression are unable to be exactly applied to the case of spaceborne sliding spotlight SAR due to great azimuth shifts in both time and frequency domains. In this paper, an extended chirp scaling algorithm is presented for spaceborne sliding spotlight SAR data imaging. The proposed algorithm firstly uses the spectral analysis（SPECAN） technique to avoid the azimuth spectrum folding effect and then employs the chirp scaling（CS） algorithm to achieve data focusing, i.e., the so-called two-step approach. To suppress the sidelobe level, an efficient strategy for the azimuth spectral weighting which only involves matrix multiplications and short fast Fourier transformations（FFTs） is proposed, which is a post-process executed on the focused SAR image and particularly simple to be implemented. The SAR image processed by the proposed extended CS algorithm is very precise and perfectly phase-preserving. In the end, computer simulation results verify the analysis and confirm the validity of the proposed algorithm.