Reconstruct azimuth signal and suppress interbeam ambiguities of SPCMB SAR with hybrid filterbank

Abstract

Conventional Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems cannot obtain high-resolution and wide-swath illumination area due to the well-known minimum antenna area constraint. Single Phase Center MultiBeam (SPCMB) technique can overcome this limitation by adding spatial sampling through multiple receivers in azimuth direction. Unfortunately, this approach will lead to an increase of azimuth ambiguities (interbeam ambiguities), because each receive beam’s mainlobe overlaps with the other ones’ sidelobes. This paper proves that the front part of SPCMB SAR systems can be considered to be a hybrid filterbank. Therefore, the azimuth signal can be reconstructed and the interbeam ambiguities can be effectively suppressed by a well-designed hybrid filterbank.