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The filtered backprojection (FBP) algorithm is viewed as a preferred candidate for general bistatic synthetic aperture radar (BiSAR) imaging since it does not pose any restrictions on SAR configurations or flight paths. However, high-efficient autofocus methods such as phase gradient autofocus (PGA) or Mapdrift (MD) cannot be effectively integrated with the FBP algorithm due to the unknown properties of the BiSAR FBP imagery spectrum. In this article, a novel Fourier-based interpretation of the BiSAR FBP algorithm is presented. Based on the new viewpoint, spectral characteristics of the BiSAR FBP imagery in the wavenumber domain, including range spectral ambiguity, space-variant spectral support, and the structural 2-D phase error, are derived in detail. Using these characteristics, a computationally efficient 2-D autofocus approach is proposed. First, a preprocessing is performed to eliminate the range spectral ambiguity and to align the skewed spectrum support, which facilitates the following phase error estimation and correction. Then, an estimation of the 1-D azimuth phase error (APE) is applied by combining multiple estimation results from different subband data. Finally, the 2-D phase error is computed directly from the estimated APE by exploiting the derived analytical structure of the 2-D phase error, which is then applied to restore the BiSAR FBP image. The simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 360° video synthetic aperture radar (VideoSAR) appears as an interactive observation capability to understand the dynamic scenarios. VideoSAR system mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) delivers a highly flexible and cost-effective approach. In this letter, the UAV-borne repeat-pass circular stripmap (CSM) VideoSAR observation is formulated in the format of video area overflown to enhance the wide-area surveillance capability. A completely two-dimensional interpolation-free polar format algorithm is employed, especially in terms of repeat-pass CSM-VideoSAR configuration. We conduct the repeat-pass CSM-VideoSAR experiments on multirotor UAV-borne system in the interests of imaging demonstration and promoting the inspirations on the related open issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An alternate transmitting mode (ATM) is an important synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging mode as it can provide rich waveform design degrees of freedom to improve the system performance, especially to mitigate range ambiguities. However, the azimuth ambiguity issue caused by the differences between the autocorrelation functions of transmitted waveforms is ignored in existing studies. In this article, a deep understanding of the ambiguities in the ATM allows a correct evaluation of the ambiguity-to-signal ratio and the design of quasi-orthogonal nonlinear frequency modulation (NLFM) waveforms optimized for ambiguity suppression. Moreover, a novel azimuth compensation method is developed to remove the azimuth ambiguities caused by waveform diversity. Finally, detailed simulation experiments are carried out to verify the theoretical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polar format algorithm (PFA) is an efficient image formation algorithm for spotlight-mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR). However, the derivation of PFA relies upon the approximation of planar wavefront, and the resulting wavefront curvature error (WCE) causes severe SAR image degradation, e.g., distortion and defocus. The distortion stems from the first-order WCE and the defocus mainly comes from the quadratic WCE. To eliminate the defocusing effects, the existing space-variant post-filtering algorithms (SVPFAs) mainly compensate the quadratic term of WCE and ignore the residual high-order terms. Actually, the residual odd-order WCE will also broaden the main-lobe of the target and the residual even-order WCE will lead to the problem of sidelobe asymmetry. To tackle these issues, this letter proposes a modified SVPFA to correct both the quadratic and the residual high-order WCE. First, based on the derivation of PFA, the accurate expression of WCE is obtained. Second, the quadratic and residual high-order WCE are separated without complicated high-order two-dimensional Taylor expansion. Finally, the WCE is corrected by phase compensation and geometric distortion correction, respectively. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by simulation experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

360-degree video synthetic aperture radar (VideoSAR) presents a powerful capability for the information perception of dynamic scenes. In comparison to time-consuming airborne SAR, miniature SAR (MiniSAR) mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle platform is a cost-effective configuration that provides a higher operation flexibility for video acquisition. Nevertheless, MiniSAR system development and signal processing limited by multiple factors are still challenging issues, including restricted weight, volume, power consumption, complicated trajectory imaging, and high-efficient video processing. In this article, we develop a multirotors VideoSAR system at X-band in Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, concerning hardware architecture, field experiment, and video signal processing. It has the capability of ultrahigh resolution imaging with three available channels up to 1.8-GHz transmission bandwidth. Field programmable gate array-based unified signal processing architecture can further accelerate the generation of massive VideoSAR sequences in terms of both circular spotlight and stripmap modes. Several experimental results have been presented to demonstrate the validity of our developed system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The filtered backprojection (FBP) algorithm is a popular choice for complicated trajectory synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image formation processing due to its inherent nonlinear motion compensation capability. However, how to efficiently refocus the defocused FBP imagery when the motion measurement is not accurate enough is still a challenging problem. In this paper, a new interpretation of the FBP derivation is presented from the Fourier transform point of view. Based on this new viewpoint, the property of the residual 2-D phase error in FBP imagery is analyzed in detail. Then, by incorporating the derived a priori knowledge on the 2-D phase error, an accurate and efficient 2-D autofocus approach is proposed. This new approach performs the parameter estimation in a dimension-reduced parameter subspace by exploiting the a priori analytical structure of the 2-D phase error, therefore it possesses much higher accuracy and efficiency than the conventional blind methods. Finally, experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video synthetic aperture radar (VideoSAR) technology, which has fine resolution and high frame rate, is used to obtain the dynamic information of the observation scene. However, the height information of the target produces some additional offsets of target location in the digital elevation model under multiangle VideoSAR image sequence. This study analyses the reason for the target location displacement in VideoSAR, which includes the deduction of the mathematical relation between the location displacement and VideoSAR imaging geometry, as well as the influence of target height. Finally, the simulation results validate the theoretical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With continuous improvement of the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) resolution, the 2-D defocus effect in SAR image resulting from uncompensated motion error has made autofocus become a new challenging problem. Conventional 2-D autofocus approaches assume that the 2-D phase error is absolutely unknown and estimate them directly. Due to high dimensionality of the unknown parameters, these approaches often suffer from high computational burden and low estimate accuracy. In this paper, we analyze the effect of range migration algorithm (RMA) processing on the 2-D echo phase, and reveal the analytical structure of the residual 2-D phase error in RMA imagery. Then, by exploiting the derived prior knowledge on the phase error structure, an accurate and efficient 2-D autofocus approach is proposed. In the new method, only 1-D error, e.g., azimuth phase error, or residual range cell migration, is required to be estimated directly, while the 2-D phase error is computed directly from the estimated 1-D error by exploiting the analytical structure of the 2-D phase error. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are often blurred by phase perturbations induced by uncompensated sensor motion and/or unknown propagation effects caused by turbulent media. To get refocused images, autofocus proves to be a useful postprocessing technique applied to estimate and compensate the unknown phase errors. However, a severe drawback of the conventional autofocus algorithms is that they are only capable of removing one-dimensional azimuth phase errors (APEs). As the resolution becomes finer, residual range cell migration (RCM), which makes the defocus inherently two dimensional (2-D), becomes a new challenge. In this paper, correction of APE and residual RCM are presented in the framework of polar format algorithm (PFA). First, an insight into the underlying mathematical mechanism of polar reformatting is presented. Then, based on this new formulation, the effect of polar reformatting on the uncompensated APE and residual RCM is investigated in detail. By using the derived analytical relationship between APE and residual RCM, an efficient 2-D autofocus method is proposed. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For spotlight mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) autofocusing, the traditional full-aperture phase gradient autofocus (PGA) algorithm might suffer from performance degradation in the presence of significant high-order phase error and residual range cell migration (RCM), which tend to occur when the coherent processing interval (CPI) is long. Meanwhile, PGA does not perform satisfactorily when applied directly on the stripmap data. To address these shortcomings, we present a multi-subaperture PGA algorithm, which takes advantage of the map drift (MD) technique. It smoothly incorporates the estimation of residual RCM and combines the subaperture phase error (SPE) estimated by PGA in a very precise manner. The methodology and accuracy of PGA-MD are investigated in detail. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of PGA-MD in both the spotlight and the stripmap modes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An improved space-variant postfiltering approach to compensate for the wavefront curvature effect in polar format imagery is presented in this letter. The main contribution of this new method is the construction of a space-variant filter, which is based on exploiting the endomorphism property of the polar format transformation. The new approach provides an accurate and general solution to wavefront curvature compensation under arbitrary radar flight path. Finally, point target simulation has validated the effectiveness of the new approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An analytical expression of the phase error from wavefront curvature in bistatic spotlight-mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image reconstructed via polar format algorithm (PFA) is derived in this paper. The wavefront curvature effect, which arises from the unrealistic planar wavefront assumption in bistatic PFA, induces phase error terms resulting in space-variant geometry distortion and defocusing. Based on the analytical expression of the wavefront curvature error, a space-variant filtering approach is applied to compensate for it in the polar formatted bistatic SAR image. Analysis on the scene size limit after using the correction method indicates that the derived space-variant filter is capable of extending the focused scene size of bistatic PFA considerably. Point target (PT) simulation validates the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]