Focusing of the FMCW synthetic aperture ladar data

Synthetic aperture ladar (SAL) is a new remote sensing sensor and has the potential for much finer resolution than synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for its much shorter wavelength. For SAL system, frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) is usually used to achieve large time-bandwidth product (TBP). In this paper, we proposed the method for focusing the FMCW-SAL data. Firstly, we derived the signal model for FMCW-SAL without the start/stop approximation. And based on the signal model, imaging method is proposed. Then, the motion compensation for SAL is discussed. At last, we showed the imaging results for both the ground-based SAL and the airborne SAL. The imaging results verified the effectiveness of the proposed focusing method.