A Novel Reconstruction Filter for the Azimuth Multi-Channel SAR

The compensation of channel imbalances plays a vital role in signal processing of the azimuth multi-channel (AMC) synthetic aperture radar (SAR). In the operational AMC SAR system, the channel imbalance is usually considered to be a constant in both the time and frequency domain for one image. However, since the antenna patterns of all channels cannot be strictly consistent, the channel imbalances may vary with the Doppler frequency. This paper establishes the signal model of AMC SAR with channel imbalances changing with Doppler frequency and proposes a novel compensation method during the reconstruction for the echo signals received by all channels. This method has been verified by simulations and real data acquired by Gaofen-3 (GF-3). The result shows that this method has excellent potential for improving the image quality for AMC SAR.