High-Precision Spotlight SAR Imaging with Joint Modified Fast Factorized Backprojection and Autofocus

Abstract

Fast factorized backprojection (FFBP) takes advantage of high accuracy of time-domain algorithms while also possessing high efficiency comparable with conventional frequency domain algorithms. When phase errors need to be compensated for high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, however, neither polar formatted subimages within FFBP flow nor the final Cartesian image formed by FFBP is suitable for phase gradient autofocus (PGA). This is because these kinds of images are not capable of providing PGA with a clear Fourier transform relationship (FTR) between image domain and range-compressed phase history domain. In this paper, we make some essential modifications to the original FFBP and present a scheme to incorporate overlapped-subaperture frame for an accurate PGA processing. The raw data collected by an airborne high-resolution spotlight SAR are used to demonstrate the performance of this algorithm.