Full-Aperture Processing of Airborne Microwave Photonic SAR Raw Data
Jianlai Chen, Mengliang Li, Hanwen Yu, Mengdao Xing
Abstract
At present, the resolution of the most advanced airborne microwave photonic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can reach the order of centimeters or even millimeters, so the two-dimensional spatial variation and two-dimensional coupling characteristics of motion error will become more serious. In this paper, based on the advantages of nonlinear chirp scaling (NCS) and resampling (RS) processing, a microwave photonic SAR full-aperture autofocus algorithm based on a cascaded NCS-RS is proposed. Firstly, the proposed algorithm combines the typical two-step MoCo and chirp-Z transform (CZT) to correct the range spatial variant characteristics of motion error. Then, a cascaded NCS-RS processing is used to correct the azimuth spatial variant characteristics of motion error, in which NCS processing is introduced before range cell migration correction (RCMC) and RS processing is introduced after RCMC. Finally, the RS in cascaded NCS-RS processing is modified to change with range to correct the range-azimuth coupling characteristic of motion error. The three steps of the algorithm belong to the full-aperture processing, which avoids the problems of grating lobes and image stitching caused by the sub-aperture algorithm. The estimation of the parameters in NCS-RS processing is modeled as a high-dimensional optimization problem. Before solving this optimization problem, it is converted to multiple one-dimensional optimization problems. The results of processing simulated and measured data verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.