A Modified Azimuth Weighting Method in a Two-Step Process Approach for Sliding Spotlight Data Processing

Sensors (Basel). 2017 Jan 24;17(2):220. doi: 10.3390/s17020220.

Abstract

Low sidelobes are important and essential in all SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images, regardless of the imaging mode, for fewer artificial targets. For strip-map mode all targets overlap in frequency, which is convenient to suppress sidelobes. However, weighting requires total overlap in the time or frequency domain, which a sliding spotlight signal could not satisfy. Furthermore, the wavelength cannot be regarded as a constant value under the condition of a wideband chirp signal, which leads to the variation of the Doppler bandwidth along with the range frequency. In this article, an azimuth weighting method is proposed that considers the influence of a wideband based on a two-step algorithm. The computer simulation is given to verify the presented method.

Keywords: sliding spotlight; synthetic aperture radar (SAR); two-step processing approach; weighting method.