Compensation of Phase Errors for Spotlight SAR With Discrete Azimuth Beam Steering Based on Entropy Minimization

Spotlight synthetic aperture radar (SAR) achieves very high-resolution (VHR) images by steering the azimuth beam during the formation of the synthetic aperture. In practice, the steering is implemented through discrete azimuth beam switching. Then, phase shifts can occur between the adjacent beams due to the error of the antenna pattern. In addition, the troposphere introduces a beam-angle-dependent delay to the echo. Those undesired phase shifts and delays cause phase errors in the received echo and result in image quality deterioration. In this letter, an algorithm, called the Newton entropy minimization (N-EM), is proposed to estimate and compensate the phase errors caused by the discrete azimuth beam steering for the spotlight SAR data. Combining with the subaperture imaging approach of the spotlight SAR, the algorithm estimates the phase offsets between each couple of the adjacent beams based on the minimum entropy criterion. The analytic expression, which is a nonlinear equation, is developed for the optimal estimation. Then, the Newton's method is employed to solve the equation. The real spaceborne SAR (both the staring and sliding spotlight modes) data processing results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed algorithm.