Fourier-Domain Multichannel Autofocus for Synthetic Aperture Radar

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging suffers from image focus degradation in the presence of phase errors in the received signal due to unknown platform motion or signal propagation delays. We present a new autofocus algorithm, termed Fourier-domain multichannel autofocus (FMCA), that is derived under a linear algebraic framework, allowing the SAR image to be focused in a noniterative fashion. Motivated by the mutichannel autofocus (MCA) approach, the proposed autofocus algorithm invokes the assumption of a low-return region, which generally is provided within the antenna sidelobes. Unlike MCA, FMCA works with the collected polar Fourier data directly and is capable of accommodating wide-angle monostatic SAR and bistatic SAR scenarios. Most previous SAR autofocus algorithms rely on the prior assumption that radar's range of look angles is small so that the phase errors can be modeled as varying along only one dimension in the collected Fourier data. And, in some cases, implicit assumptions are made regarding the SAR scene. Performance of such autofocus algorithms degrades if the assumptions are not satisfied. The proposed algorithm has the advantage that it does not require prior assumptions about the range of look angles, nor characteristics of the scene.