A novel high resolution wide swath SAR based on waveform design

Abstract

Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), with all weather, day or night imaging capabilities, has been playing an important role in the domination of Earth observation. Spaceborne high-resolution wide-swath SAR (HRWS-SAR) can quickly obtain wide range of the earth’s surface information, which is of great significance to Earth mapping, geological exploration, vegetation and biomass estimates, marine monitoring, target search, disaster relief, etc. As a result, spaceborne HRWS-SAR has been gaining more and more attention. However, considering the restrictions on pulse repetition frequency (PRF) and power-aperture product, space-based SAR imaging cannot achieve high resolution and wide swath at the same time. Currently existing solutions mainly focus on the antenna system hardware devices, such as MIMO, DBF; other signal-processing-bias solutions, such as Mosaic imaging technology, have higher requirements of the antenna pointing or beam control. These methods adopt more antenna elements or complex beam control method, which greatly increased the demand for hardware performance, and the signal processing method become more complicated as well. In order to relieve the pressure on the system hardware devices, this paper presents a new orthogonal coded waveform method based on the theory of communication. By using this method, the LFM signal is coded by the orthogonal codes to make the inter-pulse waveform irrelevant, which ensures the azimuth sampling rate as well as a wide swath. Theoretically, this method can alleviate the contradiction between PRF and high resolution wide swath imaging.