Processing Spaceborne Interrupted FMCW SAR Data with Modified Aperture Interpolation Technique

Interrupted FMCW (IFMCW) SAR mode, which only employs a single antenna from a single micro-satellite, was proposed by Ahmed et al., recently. However, periodical data gaps will occur in the interrupted mode, caused by the process of switching the radar transmitter on and off. To solve this problem, in this paper, a modified aperture-interpolation -based approach is proposed to fill the data gaps. The approach can recover the gapped data with excellent performance and thus significantly suppress the artifacts (or ghosts) induced by the periodical data gaps. Processing results of real data acquired with an experimental airborne FMCW SAR system, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.