This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING 1 Azimuth Resampling Processing for Highly Squinted Synthet

Abstract—The linear range walk yields a significant range– azimuth coupling effect in a highly squinted synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Although the linear range walk correction (LRWC) technique can effectively mitigate such coupling effect, it causes azimuth variation in the resulting signal and, as such, the so-called “azimuth-shift invariance ” property becomes invalid. In order to eliminate the azimuth variation, a new spectrum processing ap-proach based on azimuth resampling is proposed in this paper. Af-ter performing the LRWC, the azimuth resampling is carried out in the 2-D frequency domain and transforms the signal spectrum to be equivalent to that of a broadside SAR. For squinted beam-steering SAR (BS-SAR), e.g., spotlight SAR, sliding spotlight SAR, and Terrain Observation by Progressive Scans SAR, the azimuth resampling is combined with the azimuth signal reconstruction al-gorithm. As a result, both the azimuth variation, which is induced by the LRWC, and the aliasing, which is caused by antenna beam steering, can be avoided. Therefore, after the azimuth resampling, the squinted SAR data can be focused by exploiting a conventional broadside SAR imaging algorithm. An analysis of the motion error for airborne SAR data processing is also provided. Simulation and real data results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Index Terms—Azimuth resampling, linear range walk correc-tion (LRWC), squinted beam-steering SAR (BS-SAR), squinted SAR. I