A Novel Approach to Processing Very-High-Resolution Spaceborne SAR Data With Severe Spatial Dependence

Abstract

An innovative approach, mainly featured by progressive iteration of partitioning and focusing, to processing very-high-resolution spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is presented in this article. Due to the long integration time endured during data acquisition as well as large scene extensions being common to the advanced SAR systems, spatial dependence of range histories may be severe and must be properly dealt with. In this article, after deriving the exact two dimensional spectrum for an curved satellite orbit, we focus the entire echo data through several iterations of partitioning and focusing. By partitioning, each partitioned data block can be better focused by the following focusing step, and meanwhile, focusing with better quality enables the following partitioning with both higher granularity and less overlapped data region. Besides, a new technique aiming at eliminating spatial dependence inside a data block is also presented and deployed in the processing procedure. Owing to the feature of high granularity partitioning, the spatial dependence of many factors can be accommodated finer and easier compared with other conventional algorithms. What is more, the artifacts caused by sub-aperture recombination are fundamentally avoided by the fact that the partitioned blocks are not recombined until being processed into fully focused image blocks. Finally, the precision and the efficiency of the proposed methodology are validated by results on a simulated and a real SAR data.