Estimation of phase errors in SAR data by Local-Quadratic map-drift autofocus

Uncompensated phase errors lead to quality degradation of SAR images what is especially critical for high-resolution systems. In the paper, a novel approach to the stripmap autofocus is proposed. The idea of the method is to estimate the local quadratic phase errors by processing small data blocks. The conventional map-drift autofocus (MDA) algorithm is used for such estimation. Then, by a double integration of the estimated quadratic errors, an arbitrary residual phase error for large data blocks is evaluated. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated with data obtained with an X-band airborne SAR system.