Spurious Peak Elimination for Sliding Spotlight SAR Imaging With Steering Angle Quantization

Abstract

This letter proposes a method for eliminating the paired-echo-like spurious peaks in sliding spotlight synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images caused by the electronic step-by-step azimuth beam steering. The basic idea of the method originates from the extended ideal filtering for suppressing the SAR azimuth ambiguities. The concept of deconvolving filtering is further extended and a new form of deconvolving filter is presented. Using the new filtering, not only the first and odd spurious peaks of point-like targets but also the even spurious peaks can be removed all at once from the detected SAR images. Simulated data from a sliding-spotlight SAR system with quantized azimuth steering are used to verify the improvement in image quality by using the new method.