Two-Step Accuracy Improvement of Motion Compensation for Airborne SAR With Ultrahigh Resolution and Wide Swath

Abstract

The motion compensation (MOCO) for the airborne SAR with ultrahigh resolution and wide swath is required to consider the range-dependent (RD) phase error. The RD phase error may cause an RD residual-range cell migration (RCM) after the correction of RCM, which can degrade the performance of phase gradient autofocus (PGA) when estimating the phase error. In addition, because the PGA estimation is based on the strong scattering point, it may wrongly estimate the phase error for some observation scenes without strong scattering point. Alternatively, to take into account the above two problems, we study a MOCO algorithm based on two-step accuracy improvement. In the algorithm, the first step is to estimate and correct the RD residual-RCM and thus improves the accuracy of PGA. The second step is to develop a prior-information-based-weighted least square (PI-WLS) to further improve the accuracy of RD phase error estimation. Processing of airborne real data validates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.