Synthetic aperture inversion for arbitrary flight paths in the presence of noise and clutter

Abstract

This paper considers synthetic aperture radar and other synthetic aperture imaging systems from an arbitrary (known) flight path. We assume a single-scattering model for the radar data, and we assume that the ground topography is known but not necessarily flat. We focus on cases in which the antenna footprint is so large that the standard narrow-beam algorithms are not useful. For this case, (Nohan, CJ and Cheney, M, 2003) gave an explicit backprojection imaging formula that corrects for the ground topography, flight path, antenna beam pattern, source waveform, and other geometrical factors. In this paper, we show how to modify the backprojection algorithm to account for statistical information about noise and clutter.