The coupling between range and azimuth dimensions is the main obstacle for highly squinted synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data focusing. Range walk correction (RWC) processing is effective to remove the linear coupling term, but the residual high order range cell migration (RCM) parts are spatial-variant in both range and azimuth dimensions. In this paper, we propose a precise spatial-variant range cell migration correction (RCMC) method with subaperture processing. The method contains two stages. Firstly, the main component of range-variant RCM is corrected in the coarse RCMC stage. Secondly, data are derived into azimuth subapertures (SAs), an SA-image-domain RCMC is developed by interp correction, where the SA image is obtained using a modified spectrum analysis (SPECAN) algorithm by establishing the relationship between Doppler frequency and residual spatial-variant RCM. In the proposed algorithm, precise compensation of space-variant RCM is implemented by SA processing, which is designed for a better practicality in real-time processing system. Simulated and real measured data experiments are designed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for highly squinted SAR imaging.
Keywords: highly squinted; range cell migration correction (RCMC); subaperture; synthetic aperture radar (SAR).