Estimation of High-Frequency Vibration Parameters for Airborne Terahertz SAR Using Chirplet Decomposition and LS Sequential Estimators

Abstract

Due to the short wavelength of the terahertz wave, airborne terahertz synthetic aperture radar (THz-SAR) suffers from echo phase errors caused by the high-frequency vibration of the platform. These errors will result in defocusing and the emergence of ghost targets, which will degrade the quality of the image. Therefore, it is necessary to compensate for phase errors in order to bring the image into focus. This paper proposes a multi-component high-frequency vibration parameter estimation method based on chirplet decomposition and least squares (LS) sequential estimators, which differs from other methods that can only be applied to simple harmonic vibrations. In particular, we first obtain the instantaneous chirp rate (ICR) of the signal by chirplet decomposition. Then, we employ the LS sequential estimators in conjunction with separable regression technique (SRT) to estimate vibration parameters. The estimated parameters are subsequently used to re-establish the ICR components for each vibration component and these parameters are further re-estimated to improve their accuracy. Based on the estimated parameters, phase compensation functions can be constructed to suppress the defocusing and ghost targets in airborne THz-SAR imaging. Simulated results on point targets and distributed imaging scenes demonstrate that the proposed method is accurate and reliable even at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).