A Two-Step Wide-Scene Polar Format Algorithm for High-Resolution Highly-Squinted SAR

Abstract

Traditional polar format algorithm (PFA) is widely used in high-resolution and highly-squinted (HRHS) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems, because of its unique decoupling ability for any squint angle. However, the image size limit in traditional PFA, affected by the wavefront curvature, is too small to meet the modern wide-scene requirements. To break the limit, a new two-step PFA is proposed in this letter. It uses PFA twice. The first PFA is to obtain a coarse focused big image, from which a number of subimages can be filtered out. Each subimage could be recovered to the original phase history domain and reprocessed by another modified PFA, i.e., second PFA, to get a precisely focused subimage. The final full-image can be obtained easily by mosaicking subimages together. This two-step approach is derived in detail and could obviously enlarge the valid PFA scene. It is validated by simulated and real data.