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The low-earth-orbit synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can achieve enhanced remote-sensing capabilities by exploiting the large-scale and long-duration beam coverage of a geosynchronous (GEO) SAR illuminator. Different bistatic imaging modes can be implemented by the steering of an antenna beam onboard the LEO receiver, such as high-resolution sliding-spotlight mode. In this paper, the accurate focusing of GEO-LEO bistatic SAR (GEO-LEO BiSAR) in sliding-spotlight mode is investigated. First, the two major problems of the accurate bistatic range model, i.e., curved trajectory within long integration time and 'stop-and-go' assumption error, for sliding-spotlight GEO-LEO BiSAR are analyzed. Then, a novel bistatic range model based on equivalent circular orbit trajectory is proposed to accurately represent the range history of GEO-LEO BiSAR in sliding-spotlight mode. Based on the proposed range model, a frequency-domain imaging method is put forward. First, a modified two-step preprocessing method is implemented to remove the Doppler aliasing caused by azimuth variance of Doppler centroid and beam steering. Then, an azimuth trajectory scaling is formulated to remove the azimuth variance of motion parameters due to curved trajectory. A modified frequency-domain imaging method is derived to eliminate the 2-D spatial variance and achieve accurate focusing of the echo data. Finally, imaging results and analysis on both simulated data and real data from an equivalent BiSAR experiment validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the complexity of high-squint synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mounted on maneuvering platforms, the traditional geometric model and imaging algorithms cannot be directly applied in the diving or climbing stage for the existence of vertical velocity. Aiming at this issue, an equivalent geometric model of maneuvering high-squint-mode SAR is constructed, and a modified wavenumber-domain imaging algorithm combined with the proposed equivalent range model is proposed in this article. First, the disadvantages of the conventional range model are analyzed in detail and an equivalent range model is proposed to describe the motion characteristic of squint SAR in maneuvering mode, which maintains the azimuth-shift invariance along the flight direction in the new slant range plane. Then, to achieve the requirement of maneuvering SAR real-time processing, a modified wavenumber-domain imaging algorithm with a high usage of the spectrum by axis rotation for high-squint SAR data is proposed. Further, since the equivalent model may introduce the severe distortion in the imaging plane, a novel geometric correction method based on inverse projection is performed to obtain the ground imagery with a little distortion. Finally, simulation and real-data processing results validate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

The low-earth-orbit synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can achieve enhanced remote-sensing capabilities by exploiting the large-scale and long-duration beam coverage of a geosynchronous (GEO) SAR illuminator. Different bistatic imaging modes can be implemented by the steering of an antenna beam onboard the LEO receiver, such as high-resolution sliding-spotlight mode. In this paper, the accurate focusing of GEO-LEO bistatic SAR (GEO-LEO BiSAR) in sliding-spotlight mode is investigated. First, the two major problems of the accurate bistatic range model, i.e., curved trajectory within long integration time and ‘stop-and-go’ assumption error, for sliding-spotlight GEO-LEO BiSAR are analyzed. Then, a novel bistatic range model based on equivalent circular orbit trajectory is proposed to accurately represent the range history of GEO-LEO BiSAR in sliding-spotlight mode. Based on the proposed range model, a frequency-domain imaging method is put forward. First, a modified two-step preprocessing method is implemented to remove the Doppler aliasing caused by azimuth variance of Doppler centroid and beam steering. Then, an azimuth trajectory scaling is formulated to remove the azimuth variance of motion parameters due to curved trajectory. A modified frequency-domain imaging method is derived to eliminate the 2-D spatial variance and achieve accurate focusing of the echo data. Finally, imaging results and analysis on both simulated data and real data from an equivalent BiSAR experiment validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

For air-missile borne bistatic forward-looking beam-steering synthetic aperture radar (BFLBS-SAR), the receiver platform moves along a curve track due to the existence of accelerations. Besides, transmitting and receiving antenna beams rotate around a certain rotary center during the process of data collection to extend or shorten synthetic aperture time. These characteristics imply that the echo signal suffers serious range–azimuth coupling and aliasing problems of azimuth spectrum. Worse still, the echo process has problems of double-radical sign and high-order terms, which makes the rotary beam center unable to be obtained directly, and thus, the traditional polar formation algorithm (PFA) cannot be applied directly to BFLBS-SAR. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a generalized PFA (GPFA) for air-missile borne BFLBS-SAR. The algorithm uses the equivalent bistatic linear range model first to separate platform acceleration errors. By equating the bistatic mode to the monostatic one, an equivalent rotary center is obtained, and a new azimuth Deramp function is introduced to eliminate aliasing. Then, spectrum utilization and azimuth sampling rate are improved by spectral rotation and interpolation, and the image format is changed. In the azimuth focusing phase, azimuth aliasing is avoided by means of azimuth scaling, which makes azimuth focusing possible eventually. Numerous simulation experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed GPFA.