Precise spaceborne SAR image formation technique based on the analysis of critical errors using the spaceborne SAR simulator

Abstract

This paper proposes the precise spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image formation technique based on the analysis of critical error factors that severely degrade the SAR image quality. These are error factors related to the antenna beam pointing, the effective velocity, and the Doppler centroid. We newly developed the spaceborne SAR system simulator which is able to analysis effects that critical errors of the user-designed spaceborne SAR induce on a focused image. Using it, effects of critical errors are analyzed for spaceborne SAR image formation. Analysis results show that these cause phase distortion of rawdata, distort the symmetry of the azimuth impulse response function (IRF) of point targets in the focused image, and defocus the SAR image. To resolve these problems, we suggest to make use of the phase gradient algorithm (PGA) to compensate phase distortion induced by antenna beam pointing errors. Also, the effective velocity of the illuminated beam and the Doppler centroid of spaceborne SAR rawdata are exactly calculated by proposed methods using both orbit state vectors and the rawdata acquisition geometry based on the newly defined twoway slant range equation model. Furthermore, azimuth block processing is used to reduce signal level of ambiguities produced by sidelobes of antenna beam. The experimental results on the simulated SAR data show that proposed methods are able to reduce error effects as well as improve the focused SAR image quality greatly.