A New Approach to Airborne High Resolution SAR Motion Compensation for Large Trajectory Deviations

The Two-step algorithm (TSA) is widely used for trajectory deviation compensation of airborne Synthetic aperture radar (SAR), by which most of the motion errors are compensated before Range curve migration compensation (RCMC) and the residual after the RCMC. We found that the RCMC in the presence of the residual motion errors results in additional range shift errors hard to be compensated for. Based on theoretical investigations, this shortage of TSA is reported and a new compensation scheme which greatly alleviates the RCMC induced errors is proposed. Besides, range resampling considering the residual motion errors is very convinent, which, however, is boresome in TSA. The new method is effective to compensate the high resolution SAR systems for large trajectory deviations, which is hard to be achieved by TSA because of the uncompensated errors. Results on the simulated data are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new method.