Adaptive two-step calibration for high resolution and wide-swath SAR imaging

In this study, the authors focus on the channel calibration for digital beam forming (DBF) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. Incorporated with DBF processing, multi-channel SAR is promising in high-resolution and wide-swath (HRWS) imaging. It coherently combines recorded multi-channel signals to overcome the spectrum ambiguity. However, the mismatch between channels and baseline errors phase should be compensated before the processing. In this study, the authors propose a novel calibration for DBF SAR imagery by making use of the orthognality between signal subspace and noise subspace. Based on that the imbalance is uncoupled in range and azimuth, the calibration has two steps: range calibration and azimuth calibration. The mismatch in range is estimated by an interpolation in time domain which is applicable in the presence of the Doppler ambiguity. The azimuth calibration is incorporated with the post-Doppler beam forming processing, which estimates the element error caused by baseline errors and channel imbalance. Real data are used to demonstrate the performance of Doppler ambiguity suppression after our calibration. The results confirm the validity of the approach.