Bistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging for Arbitrary Flight Trajectories

Abstract

In this paper, we present an analytic, filtered backprojection (FBP) type inversion method for bistatic synthetic aperture radar (BISAR). We consider a BISAR system where a scene of interest is illuminated by electromagnetic waves that are transmitted, at known times, from positions along an arbitrary, but known, flight trajectory and the scattered waves are measured from positions along a different flight trajectory which is also arbitrary, but known. We assume a single-scattering model for the radar data, and we assume that the ground topography is known but not necessarily flat. We use microlocal analysis to develop the FBP-type reconstruction method. We analyze the computational complexity of the numerical implementation of the method and present numerical simulations to demonstrate its performance.