Space-borne SAR Three-dimensional Imaging by Joint Multiple Azimuth Angle Doppler Frequency Rate Estimation

Using azimuth beam steering, space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can observe from multiple azimuth angle in single pass. During multiple azimuth angle observation, the satellite orbit is equivalent to long three-dimensional (3-D) curvilinear array, which has the potential for 3-D imaging. Sampling by space-borne multiple azimuth angle SAR is sparse in height dimension, which makes unambiguous 3-D imaging by 3-D fast Fourier transform infeasible. Besides, the complex relationship between the targets’projection in multi-angle SAR images and the height error is difficult to determine. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we present a 3-D imaging method based on joint multiple azimuth angle Doppler frequency rate estimation. First, a relationship is proposed between the height error and Doppler frequency rate at different azimuth angle. Then, the Doppler frequency modulation rate error is estimated by Map Drift (MD) technique. Next, the height estimation results of different azimuth angle are combined to improve the estimation accuracy. From the estimated height and the target location in the SAR images, 3-D geometric information is retrieved and 3-D imaging is achieved. Our simulation experiments validate that the height estimation can achieve an accuracy of few meters with the proposed method.