This paper focuses on an improved imaging algorithm for spotlight synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with continuous Pulse Repetition Interval (PRI) variation in extremely high-resolution. Conventional SAR systems are limited in that a wide swath cannot be achieved with a high azimuth resolution in the meantime. This limitation can be overcome by Pulse Repetition Frequency (PRF) variation in a SAR system. However, there are problems such as the ambiguities of point targets or extended targets caused by nonuniform sampling. A reconstructive method, Nonuniform Discrete Fourier Transform (NUDFT) has been presented in the current literature, but it is rather computationally expensive. In this paper, a modified sinc interpolation based on NUDFT is proposed, which is used to reconstruct the uniformly sampled echo in time domain. Since the interpolation kernel length is relatively short, it is more computationally efficient. Then, the two-step processing approach combined with the modified sinc interpolation is further presented, which has much better accuracy than that combined with the conventional sinc interpolation. Both the simulated data and the extracted GF-3 data experiment demonstrate the validity and accuracy of the proposed approach.
Keywords: PRI variation; high-resolution; modified sinc interpolation; spotlight SAR.