New analytical imaging algorithm for general case airborne bistatic SAR

Abstract

This paper focuses on the general case (GC) airborne bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data processing, and a new analytical imaging algorithm based on the extended Loffeld's bistatic formula (ELBF) is proposed. According to the bistatic SAR geometry, the track decoupling formulas that convert the bistatic geometry to the receiver-referenced geometry in a concise way are derived firstly. Then phase terms of ELBF are decomposed into two independent phase terms as the range phase term and the azimuth phase term in a new way. To get the focusing result, the bistatic deformation (BD) term is compensated in the two-dimensional (2-D) frequency domain, and the space-variances of the range phase term and the azimuth phase term are eliminated by chirp scaling (CS) and chirp z-transform (CZT), respectively. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by the simulation results.