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The development of phased array radar beamforming technologies has led to an ever-increasing demand for large antenna arrays and multiple beams. However, real-time processing becomes a difficulty for large array or multibeam beamforming due to huge data amount. To overcome the electronic mass data processing speed limitations, optronic technique is developed for beamforming in this letter. We present a novel real-time multibeam optronic beamforming (OPBF) system specially designed for large phased array. In our system design, beamforming is formulated as a finite-impulse response filtering process, of which radar raw data and weighting coefficients are encoded onto the laser beam by joint amplitude and phase control (JAPC) modules and two-dimension adding is performed by a lens. Ultrafast optical calculation and the proposed high-speed JAPC module make the system powerful for real-time processing. The proposed system has good expansibility in data capacity, which makes it applicable to massive data processing. What’s more, a practical low-power optronic beamformer is demonstrated. Measured results show that the presented OPBF system is able to accurately synthesize flexible and controllable multibeams and performs well in channel equalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple azimuth channels are usually employed to overcome the inherent limitation between high resolution and wide swath in synthetic aperture radar systems. However, unavoidable channel phase errors will significantly degrade the performance of ambiguity suppression. Conventional calibration methods usually regard these phase errors as constants during the whole observation time and ignore the azimuth-variant phase errors, which may not totally suppress azimuth ambiguities especially for very strong targets. This letter presents an azimuth-variant phase error calibration technique. The proposed technique first selects a strong point-like target as the calibration source. Then, the azimuth-variant phase errors can be estimated by comparing the phase of the calibration source and the corresponding steering vector in the range-compressed signals. Besides, a preprocessing method is presented to improve the calibration accuracy when the selected calibration source is affected by noise or interferences. Theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed technique. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multichannel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signal reconstruction methods can effectively suppress azimuth ambiguities and achieve high-resolution wide-swath imaging. However, due to the characteristics of the practical antenna patterns, there exist non-bandlimited Doppler spectra, which will result in residual azimuth ambiguities, especially for strong targets. This letter presents a novel method for the suppression of the azimuth ambiguities of the strong point-like targets. First, we find out the positions of the strong point-like targets from the multichannel reconstructed SAR image. Then, we locate the ambiguous range history of each strong point-like target. Finally, the ambiguous components in the range history are filtered out by an orthogonal projection method. Therefore, the spectra of the strong point-like targets will be converted into the bandlimited spectra, and then, the azimuth ambiguities can be effectively suppressed by the conventional multichannel SAR signal reconstruction methods. Theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

High-resolution and wide-swath synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging can be achieved by the azimuth multichannel system. The minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer can be utilized to suppress azimuth ambiguities. However, the presence of channel phase errors significantly deteriorates the performance of the azimuth multichannel SAR system. Instead of employing subspace techniques, this letter proposes a robust channel phase error calibration algorithm via maximizing the MVDR beamformer output power. Compared with the conventional subspace-based calibration methods, there is no redundancy of channels required to estimate the subspaces in the proposed algorithm. Also, the proposed algorithm is relatively robust, because it avoids the subspace swap phenomenon, which probably takes place at low signal-to-noise ratios for the subspace techniques. Moreover, the proposed method has the advantage of estimating the channel phase errors without covariance matrix decomposition, which reduces the computation load. The simulation experiments and the real data processing validate the effectiveness of the proposed calibration method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multichannel synthetic aperture radar systems in azimuth can effectively suppress azimuth ambiguity and are promising in high-resolution wide-swath imaging. However, unavoidable channel errors will significantly degrade the performance of ambiguity suppression. Conventional subspace calibration methods usually estimate phase error via decomposing a Doppler-variant covariance matrix from one Doppler bin, and then average these errors estimated from several Doppler bins to improve the estimation accuracy, which will result in a large computational load. This letter presents an improved channel error calibration method, which works on the undersampled data of the individual azimuth channel. By a proposed matrix transformation method, the Doppler-variant covariance matrices will be transformed into a constant covariance matrix. Therefore, the improved calibration algorithm needs to estimate and decompose the new covariance matrix only once. The computation load could be greatly reduced. Moreover, the new covariance matrix can be estimated by training samples not only from range bins but also from Doppler bins, which will improve the estimation accuracy. Theoretical analysis and experiments based on simulations and measurements showed the high accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of the improved method, particularly in low signal-to-noise ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A system design of optronic high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing is proposed in this letter; it has the capability of adaptive phase error compensation. In our system design, SAR raw data are focused optically by phase correction in the two-dimensional frequency domain. The computations of SAR image formation are performed by spatial light modulators and lenses. With the propagation of the laser beam, the imaging results can be captured by the charge-coupled device. The phase error can be estimated from the imaging results, and adaptive phase error compensation is implemented in the optronic processing. Phase error compensation makes the optronic processing robust and flexible; it can be used for both the initial system calibration and the focus quality improvement. Finally, the experimental setup is demonstrated. The entropies of the images with and without phase error compensation are analyzed, which validates its performance on improving the focus quality. The real data results of an airborne SAR and RADARSAT are given. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]