Analyses of signal characteristics of highly-maneuvering platform SAR and time-domain imaging method

Abstract

Comparing with conventional airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the signal characteristics of highly-maneuvering (HM) platform SAR are much more complicated that makes the HM-SAR imaging difficult to process. To address this problem, this paper establishes the HM-SAR signal model in wavenumber-domain and analyses the signal characteristics for SAR imaging, based on which the relationship between the HM-SAR echoes and the spectrum of SAR image is revealed. Then, the two dimensional Nyquist sampling rates for imaging are designated accordingly and an effective time-domain image process is developed with high accuracy. Simulation results are presented and analyzed to validate the performance of the proposed method.