Efficiency and Robustness Improvement of Airborne SAR Motion Compensation With High Resolution and Wide Swath

For airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging with high resolution and wide swath, the atmospheric turbulence may produce serious range-dependent (RD) motion error. To estimate the RD motion error, traditional methods usually first divide the range full-aperture data into multiple range blocks, and then use phase gradient autofocus (PGA) to estimate the phase error of all range blocks one by one, which is inefficient. In addition, the robustness of PGA is also affected by the number of strong scattering points. To solve these two problems, a new motion compensation (MoCo) algorithm is proposed to improve the efficiency and robustness of airborne SAR MoCo. The real data-processing results are given to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.