Parametric Azimuth-Variant Motion Compensation for Forward-Looking Multichannel SAR Imagery

Forward-looking multichannel synthetic aperture radar (FLMC-SAR) is an important tool for modern remote sensing applications, which has the capability to reconstruct the high-resolution image of the front area. However, due to the azimuth-variant characteristics of the motion errors over a long aperture, FLMC-SAR data processing is usually a challenging task, especially when involving the motion compensation (MOCO) coupled with Doppler ambiguity resolving. To accomplish an accurate MOCO for FLMC-SAR, a novel parametric azimuth-variant MOCO approach is proposed in this article. Aiming at the coupling problem of MOCO and Doppler ambiguity resolving over the full aperture, we can decouple them through the subaperture division. As a full synthetic aperture is decomposed into several subapertures, the high-order motion errors of the full aperture can be decomposed into the first-order motion errors of the subaperture. On this basis, the mismatch of the space–time spectrum caused by the motion errors can be solved by spectral estimation, yielding Doppler ambiguity resolving for each subaperture. Meanwhile, the azimuth-variant characteristic of motion errors in FLMC-SAR system is characterized by a parametric angle-dependent quadratic phase error (QPE) model. The motion parameters are estimated by a joint multichannel angle estimation-based signal quadratic decomposition method. Immediately, the MOCO for ambiguous targets with different motion errors can be processed separately to improve the imaging performance. Experimental results based on both simulated and real data demonstrate that the proposed method is suitable for FLMC-SAR system.