AZIMUTH NONLINEAR CHIRP SCALING INTEGRATED WITH RANGE CHIRP SCALING ALGORITHM FOR HIGHLY SQUINTED SAR IMAGING

The difficulty of focusing high-resolution highly squinted SAR data comes from the serious azimuth-range coupling, which needs to be compensated in the procedure of imaging. Generally, the linear range walk correction (LRWC) can reduce the coupling effectively, however, it also induces the problem of azimuth-dependence of residual range cell migration (RCM) and quadratic phase. A novel algorithm is proposed to solve this problem in this paper. In this algorithm, the azimuth nonlinear chirp scaling (ANCS) operation is used, which can not only eliminate the azimuth space variation of residual RCM and frequency modulation (FM) rate but also remove the azimuth misregistration. In addition, the range chirp scaling operation is applied to correct the range-dependent RCM. After implementing the unified RCM correction, range compression and azimuth compression sequentially, the focused SAR image is acquired finally. The experimental results with simulated data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms.