Azimuth Overlapped Subaperture Algorithm in Frequency Domain for Highly Squinted Synthetic Aperture Radar

Abstract

The high-resolution imaging of a highly squinted synthetic aperture radar remains difficult because of the severe coupling between the range and the azimuth. “Squint minimization” compensates for the range walking in the azimuth time domain, which efficiently increases the orthogonality between the range and the azimuth. However, this “squint minimization” introduces the azimuth space-variant phases, which can be compensated by the azimuth nonlinear chirp-scaling (ANCS) algorithm using large computational loads. In this letter, an azimuth overlapped subaperture algorithm (AOSA) is proposed to compensate for these phases in the Doppler frequency domain. The validity constraint of this algorithm is then analyzed. The AOSA has an advantage over ANCS in terms of the computational load and is considerably more suitable for real-time processing.