Synthetic aperture radar imaging from phase-corrupted data

A new method to accurately reconstruct a synthetic aperture radar complex image starting from raw received data whose phase is affected by propagation in the turbulent atmosphere and/or by motion instability of the platform carrying the antenna is presented. It is based on the inversion of the, nonlinear relationship between the raw data square amplitude distribution and the unknown complex reflectivity of the scenario. The unknown complex reflectivity is found by minimising a proper functional using the partial phase information carried out by the phase-corrupted raw data as the initial guess of an iterative procedure. The method, which is capable of compensating for both 1-D and 2-D phase errors, has been validated on both simulated data and real data whose phase has been corrupted by a simulated phase error. The considerable accuracy of the final images proves the effectiveness of the proposed procedure.