Acceleration Model Analyses and Imaging Algorithm for Highly Squinted Airborne Spotlight-Mode SAR with Maneuvers

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is usually performed along a straight path. In practice, variations from the ideal caused by maneuvers with acceleration are inevitable. The main problem is the complex signal processing, particularly in the highly squinted spotlight mode. In this paper, acceleration model is analyzed in more details. Impacts are obtained how the acceleration influences the Doppler parameters and space-variant terms, including the SAR resolution and azimuth bandwidth. According to the special signal properties of the acceleration case, an approximation of the range history is made to avoid using the method of series reversion (MSR) to obtain an accurate spectrum. Based on the high-accurate spectrum, a spotlight algorithm with a modified two-step approach is given. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the modified algorithm.