The laser linewidth effect on the image quality of phase coded synthetic aperture ladar

Abstract

The phase coded (PC) waveform in synthetic aperture ladar (SAL) outperforms linear frequency modulated (LFM) signal in lower side lobe, shorter pulse duration and making the rigid control of the chirp starting point in every pulse unnecessary. Inherited from radar PC waveform and strip map SAL, the backscattered signal of a point target in PC SAL was listed and the two dimensional match filtering algorithm was introduced to focus a point image. As an inherent property of laser, linewidth is always detrimental to coherent ladar imaging. With the widely adopted laser linewidth model, the effect of laser linewidth on SAL image quality was theoretically analyzed and examined via Monte Carlo simulation. The research gives us a clear view of how to select linewidth parameters in the future PC SAL systems.