Focusing High Maneuvering Bistatic Forward-Looking SAR With Stationary Transmitter Using Extended Keystone Transform and Modified Frequency Nonlinear Chirp Scaling

Abstract

This article presents an imaging solution for high maneuvering bistatic forward-looking SAR with stationary transmitter (STHM-BFSAR). In STHM-BFSAR configuration that the transmitter is mounted on a stationary platform in side-looking mode while the receiver does high-speed maneuvering in forward-looking mode, high speed and acceleration induced by high dynamic characteristics of receiver in both along-track and height direction cause larger range cell migration (RCM) and more severe 2-D spatial variation of Doppler characteristics, which makes it more difficult to obtain well-focused bistatic SAR image. Furthermore, different from the general airborne bistatic SAR, STHM-BFSAR has a larger azimuth cubic phase term that exceeds $\pi /4$ rad, which seriously affects the image quality. To deal with these problems, an imaging algorithm based on extended keystone transform (EKT) and modified frequency nonlinear chirp scaling (FNCS) is proposed in this article. EKT can correct spatial variant range curvature and bulk linear RCM, and the residual RCM is smaller than traditional keystone transform. The proposed modified FNCS is used to equalize the azimuth-range-dependent Doppler parameters in the frequency domain, which produces lower side-lobes and higher accuracy by compensating for the second-order spatial variation of the azimuth cubic coefficients. The final simulation results in this article verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords

• 2-D spatial variation
• extended keystone transform (EKT)
• frequency nonlinear chirp scaling (FNCS)
• high maneuvering bistatic forward-looking SAR with stationary transmitter (STHM-BFSAR)