Focusing High-Squint Synthetic Aperture Radar Data Based on Factorized Back-Projection and Precise Spectrum Fusion

Abstract

This paper presents a microwave imaging algorithm for high-squint airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which combines back-projection and spectrum fusion together. Two spectrum center functions are proposed for linear and nonlinear trajectories respectively, which are the main contributions of this paper, and not considered in conventional work for high-squint SAR. For linear trajectory, the whole aperture data is first divided into sub-apertures with equal length, and the sub-aperture data is backprojected to a unified polar coordinate to generate multiple low-resolution sub-images. Then, these sub-images are corrected by an accurate spectrum center function, which is caused by the presence of squint angle. After spectrum center correction, spectrums of these sub-images can be coherently connected in cross-range wavenumber domain, generating the whole aperture spectrum. Next, the full-resolution image can be obtained by cross-range Fourier transform. For nonlinear trajectory, the deviations introduce extra spectrum shift, which degrades the focusing performance. Another spectrum center function is proposed according to angular-variant motion-error model, which helps to perform precise spectrum fusion. The proposed imaging algorithm is called high-squint accelerated factorized back-projection (HS-AFBP), and it helps to improve the focusing precision. Both the simulation and real data experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed HS-AFBP algorithm.