Estimating the Observation Area of a Stripmap SAR via an ISAR Image Sequence

Abstract

The stripmap mode is a basic and important mode for spaceborne synthetic aperture radars (SARs). Estimating the time-varying area observed by spaceborne SARs operating in stripmap mode is a practical but challenging field of research. In this article, we propose a novel method that parameterizes the time-varying area observed by the spaceborne SAR operating in the boresight stripmap mode into a fixed antenna attitude. Based on the principle of minimizing the dihedral angle between the plane containing the ideal estimated scatterers and the plane containing the actual parabolic antenna edge of a spaceborne SAR, an objective function is established for estimating the area observed by a spaceborne SAR operating in the boresight stripmap mode. Then, simulation experiments are designed to validate the feasibility and the robustness of the proposed method. The experimental simulation results show that the proposed method is feasible, and even under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions of 10 dB, the proposed method still has good robustness.

Keywords

• stripmap SAR
• observation area estimation
• inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging projection matrix
• ISAR image sequence
• attitude estimation