On the design of vehicle trajectories for high quality multistatic SAR images

Abstract

We develop guidelines for UAV trajectory design in a multistatic SAR system by studying the singular value behavior of a tomographic measurement matrix, which represents line integral measurements around ellipses in a reflectivity plane. We develop and apply bounding techniques from linear algebra to estimate the performance of the the reconstruction process based on simply-calculated statistics of the measurement matrix. Physical interpretation of the matrix analysis results, in terms of various parameters of the SAR system, is provided. Reconstruction performance for various examples of UAV trajectories are compared to one another and to these bounds.