A Novel Ship Imaging Method with Multiple Sinusoidal Functions to Match Rotation Effects in Geosynchronous SAR

Abstract

Geosynchronous Synthetic Aperture Radar (GEO SAR) has a very long Coherent Processing Interval (in the order of hundreds of seconds) compared with other SAR platforms. Thus, the current methods of rotation effect matching and ship imaging that operate within a relatively short Coherent Processing Interval (in the order of seconds) are obviously not applicable. To address this problem, a novel ship imaging method with multiple sinusoidal functions matching for rotation effects is proposed for GEO SAR. Firstly, the influence of the rotational motion of a ship on the slant range is analyzed. It can be matched with the sum of multiple sinusoidal functions, and the signal model of a ship with rotational motion is given. Then, multiple sinusoidal functions for the matching-based ship imaging method are proposed, and their procedures are presented as follows: (1) The Generalized Keystone Transform and Generalized Dechirp Process (GKTGDP) is modified to compensate for the range migration and phase caused by the motion of GEO SAR. Then, the signal is focused at the frequencies of sinusoidal functions, and the frequencies can be matched. (2) From the matched frequencies, the other parameters of sinusoidal functions can be matched by parameter searching. (3) Based on the matched results, the Back Projection Algorithm (BPA) is used to take an image of the ship with rotational motion. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by numerical experiments.