AN EXTENDED FREQUENCY SCALING ALGORITHM FOR HIGH SQUINT SPOTLIGHT AIRBORNE SAR

Abstract—In high squint spotlight mode SAR, the coupling of the range and azimuth is very serious, which brings challenges to the imaging. In this paper, an extended frequency scaling algorithm is proposed, in which the range migration correction is divided into two steps. Firstly the range walk correction is implemented in 2D time domain. In the second step, the residual range migration is corrected by the frequency scaling and bulk shift operations. Though the second range compression does not consider the range space variance, the range compression is precise. In the azimuth compression, because of the range walk correction, the azimuth modulation frequency rate becomes dependent on the azimuth position. In order to equalize the azimuth modulation frequency rate, the azimuth nonlinear chirp scaling method is involved to remove the dependence. The simulation experiments verify the validity of the proposed algorithm. The comparison of the imaging quality among traditional frequency scaling algorithm, nonlinear frequency scaling algorithm and the proposed method indicates the proposed method is more suitable for the high squint spotlight SAR. 1