Array-error estimation method for multi-channel SAR systems in azimuth

Abstract

For multi-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems, since the minimum antenna area constraint is eliminated, wide swath and high resolution SAR image can be achieved. However, the unavoidable array errors, consisting of channel gain-phase mismatch and position uncertainty, significantly degrade the performance of such systems. An iteration-free method is proposed to simultaneously estimate position and gain-phase errors. In our research, the steering vectors corresponding to a pair of Doppler bins within the same range bin are studied in terms of their rotational relationships. The method is based on the fact that the rotational matrix only depends on the position errors and the frequency spacing between the paired Doppler bins but is independent of gain-phase error. Upon combining the projection matrices corresponding to the paired Doppler bins, the position errors are directly obtained in terms of extracting the rotational matrix in a least squares framework. The proposed method, when used in conjunction with the self-calibration algorithm, performs stably as well as has less computational load, compared with the conventional methods. Simulations reveal that the proposed method behaves better than the conventional methods even when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low.