Sliding Spotlight Mode Imaging with GF-3 Spaceborne SAR Sensor

Qingjun Zhang; Feng Xiao; Zegang Ding; Meng Ke; Tao Zeng

doi:10.3390/s18010043

Sliding Spotlight Mode Imaging with GF-3 Spaceborne SAR Sensor

Sensors (Basel). 2017 Dec 26;18(1):43. doi: 10.3390/s18010043.

Authors

Qingjun Zhang^{1

2}, Feng Xiao³, Zegang Ding⁴, Meng Ke⁵, Tao Zeng⁶

Affiliations

¹ Beijing Key Laboratory of Embedded Real-time Information Processing Technology, School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China. ztzhangqj@163.com.
² China Academy of Space Technology, Beijing Institute of Space System Engineering, Beijing 100086, China. ztzhangqj@163.com.
³ Beijing Key Laboratory of Embedded Real-time Information Processing Technology, School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China. 3120150349@bit.edu.cn.
⁴ Beijing Key Laboratory of Embedded Real-time Information Processing Technology, School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China. z.ding@bit.edu.cn.
⁵ Beijing Key Laboratory of Embedded Real-time Information Processing Technology, School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China. ke11meng@163.com.
⁶ Beijing Key Laboratory of Embedded Real-time Information Processing Technology, School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China. zengtao@bit.edu.cn.

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sliding spotlight work mode can achieve high resolutions and wide swath (HRWS) simultaneously by steering the radar antenna beam. This paper aims to obtain well focused images using sliding spotlight mode with the Chinese Gaofen-3 SAR sensor. We proposed an integrated imaging scheme with sliding spotlight echoes. In the imaging scheme, the two-step approach is applied to the spaceborne sliding spotlight SAR imaging algorithm, followed by the Doppler parameter estimation algorithm. The azimuth spectral folding phenomenon is overcome by the two-step approach. The results demonstrate a high Doppler parameter estimation accuracy. The proposed imaging process is accurate and highly efficient for sliding spotlight SAR mode.

Keywords: Doppler parameter estimation; sliding spotlight; synthetic aperture radar (SAR); two-step processing approach.