An extended chirp scaling algorithm for spaceborne sliding spotlight synthetic aperture radar imaging

Abstract

A system impulse response with low sidelobes is critical in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images because sidelobes contribute to noise and interfere with nearby scatterers. However, the conventional tricks of sidelobe suppression are unable to be exactly applied to the case of spaceborne sliding spotlight SAR due to great azimuth shifts in both time and frequency domains. In this paper, an extended chirp scaling algorithm is presented for spaceborne sliding spotlight SAR data imaging. The proposed algorithm firstly uses the spectral analysis (SPECAN) technique to avoid the azimuth spectrum folding effect and then employs the chirp scaling (CS) algorithm to achieve data focusing, i.e., the so-called two-step approach. To suppress the sidelobe level, an efficient strategy for the azimuth spectral weighting which only involves matrix multiplications and short fast Fourier transformations (FFTs) is proposed, which is a post-process executed on the focused SAR image and particularly simple to be implemented. The SAR image processed by the proposed extended CS algorithm is very precise and perfectly phase-preserving. In the end, computer simulation results verify the analysis and confirm the validity of the proposed algorithm.