A NOVEL IMAGING APPROACH FOR HIGH RESOLU- TION SQUINTED SPOTLIGHT SAR BASED ON THE DERAMPING-BASED TECHNIQUE AND AZIMUTH NLCS PRINCIPLE

Abstract—The imaging problem of spotlight synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in the presence of azimuth spectrum folding phenomenon can be resolved by adopting the azimuth deramping-based technique and traditional stripmap SAR imaging algorithm, and this method is the so-called two-step processing approach. However, when the spotlight SAR operates on squinted mode, the echo two-dimensional (2D) spectrum is shifted and skewed due to the squint angle. In such case, the original two-step processing approach is not suitable anymore. This paper presents a novel imaging algorithm using the deramping-based technique and azimuth nonlinear chirp scaling (ANLCS) technique. First, the problem of azimuth spectrum folding phenomenon in squinted spotlight SAR is analyzed. Subsequently, based on the analysis results, the linear range walk correction (LRWC) is applied for removing the squint angle impacts on signal azimuth coarse focusing. At last, a modified azimuth NLCS algorithm is proposed for overcoming the depth of focus (DOF) limitation problem that induced by the LRWC preprocessing. Point targets simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to process squinted spotlight SAR data with azimuth spectrum folding phenomenon. 1