Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sliding spotlight work mode can achieve high resolutions and wide swath (HRWS) simultaneously by steering the radar antenna beam. This paper aims to obtain well focused images using sliding spotlight mode with the Chinese Gaofen-3 SAR sensor. We proposed an integrated imaging scheme with sliding spotlight echoes. In the imaging scheme, the two-step approach is applied to the spaceborne sliding spotlight SAR imaging algorithm, followed by the Doppler parameter estimation algorithm. The azimuth spectral folding phenomenon is overcome by the two-step approach. The results demonstrate a high Doppler parameter estimation accuracy. The proposed imaging process is accurate and highly efficient for sliding spotlight SAR mode.
Low sidelobes are important and essential in all SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images, regardless of the imaging mode, for fewer artificial targets. For strip-map mode all targets overlap in frequency, which is convenient to suppress sidelobes. However, weighting requires total overlap in the time or frequency domain, which a sliding spotlight signal could not satisfy. Furthermore, the wavelength cannot be regarded as a constant value under the condition of a wideband chirp signal, which leads to the variation of the Doppler bandwidth along with the range frequency. In this article, an azimuth weighting method is proposed that considers the influence of a wideband based on a two-step algorithm. The computer simulation is given to verify the presented method.
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