Practical synthetic aperture radar image formation based on realistic spaceborne synthetic aperture radar modeling and simulation

Abstract

This paper presents the practical spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data focusing method based on the realistic end-to-end spaceborne SAR simulation. Our simulation reflects main factors of the satellite SAR that induce errors to degrade the focused image severely, which are related to the sensor hardware, the antenna beam pointing, the effective velocity, and the Doppler frequency. To minimize errors due to them in the spaceborne SAR image formation, we suggest and utilize the preprocessing as the internal calibration, the analysis of orbital data of an SAR satellite, the calculation of an effective velocity and the Doppler frequency utilizing the two-way slant range equation, and the usage of the phase gradient algorithm combined with the extended chirp scaling algorithm based on the azimuth signal deramping. The processing results for realistic simulated raw data of a spaceborne SAR are presented to validate the proposed methods. (C) 2013 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)