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Aircraft inevitably experience motion caused by the flight environment in airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems. Therefore, motion compensation is essential. The real-time motion method is vital for high-resolution SAR image formation and onboard SAR signal processing. In this paper, an effective implementation scheme for a radar-timing signal generator is presented. This paper also describes a motion prediction method suitable for airborne SAR systems. The performance of the proposed real-time motion compensation scheme was evaluated using a captive flight test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To compensate the degraded SAR image due to the residual errors and the spatial variant errors remaining after the motion compensation in the airborne SAR, we have introduced the autofocus method based on the partition processing. Thus, after we perform the spatial partition for the spotlight SAR data and the time partition for the stripmap SAR data, we reconstruct the subpatch images for the partitioned data. Then, we perform the local autofocus with the suitability analysis process for the phase errors estimated by the autofocus. Moreover, if the estimated phase errors are not properly compensated for the subpatch images, we perform the phase compensation method with the weight to the estimated phase error close to the degraded subpatch image to increase the SAR image quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]