A High-Precision Motion Errors Compensation Method Based on Sub-Image Reconstruction for HRWS SAR Imaging

Abstract

High-resolution wide-swath (HRWS) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) plays an important role in remote sensing observation. However, the motion errors caused by the carrier platform’s instability severely degrade the performance of the HRWS SAR imaging. Conventional motion errors compensation methods have two drawbacks, i.e., (1) ignoring the spatial variation of the phase errors of pixels along the range direction of the scene, which leads to lower compensation accuracy, and (2) performing compensation after echo reconstruction, which fails to consider the difference in motion errors between channels, resulting in poor imaging performance in the azimuth direction. In this paper, to overcome these two drawbacks, a high-precision motion errors compensation method based on sub-image reconstruction (SI-MEC) for high-precision HRWS SAR imaging is proposed. The proposed method consists of three steps. Firstly, the motion errors of the platform are estimated by maximizing the intensity of strong points in multiple regions. Secondly, combined with the multichannel geometry, the equivalent phase centers (EPCs) used for sub-images imaging are corrected and the sub-images imaging is performed before reconstruction. Thirdly, the reconstruction is performed by using the sub-images. The proposed method has two advantages, i.e., (1) compensating for the spatially varying phase errors in the range direction, by correcting EPCs, to improve the imaging quality, and (2) compensating for the motion errors of each channel in sub-image imaging before reconstruction, to enhance the imaging quality in the azimuth direction. Moreover, the experimental results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms PGA and BP-FMSA.