An Extended Frequency Scaling Algorithm for Bistatic SAR With High Squint Angle

Abstract

Bistatic synthetic aperture radar (BiSAR) is an extended and complementary observation method to conventional monostatic SAR remote sensing. When high range and azimuth resolution are required in BiSAR, the transmitting platform, i.e., the LEO satellite, should work in the spotlight or sliding spotlight mode, which means a wide bandwidth Chirp signal is transmitted, and the targets are illuminated for a long enough time as well. In order to reduce the sampling frequency in the receiving system and improve the efficiency of the focusing procedure for this BiSAR configuration, the echoes should be dechirp received. A bistatic extended frequency scaling algorithm (Bi-EFSA) is proposed in this paper to deal with the dechirp received bistatic SAR echoes. The first step of Bi-EFSA is the range walk correction in the 2-D time domain, which reduces the space variance of the range curvatures and removals the serious coupling between range and azimuth caused by the high squint angle. After that, the range compression is achieved by secondary range compression (SRC) and bulk shift. Then, the space variance of the azimuth frequency modulation rate, introduced by the range walk correction step, is corrected by implementing the azimuth nonlinear chirp scaling (ANCS) operation. Following this, the focused results in the range frequency and azimuth time domain are obtained by the azimuth compression. The point targets and extended-scene simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.