Demonstration of a Microwave Photonic Radar for High-resolution Vehicle SAR/ISAR Imaging

A microwave photonic synthetic aperture radar (MWP SAR) is developed and experimentally demonstrated. In the transmitter, a linearly-frequency modulated (LFM) radar signal is generated through photonic-assisted frequency multiplication. While the echoes are received via photonics stretch processing in the receiver. The presented radar operates in Ku band with an instantaneous bandwidth of 5 GHz and is evaluated through a series of SAR and inverse SAR imaging tests in the field trial. With the vehicle-mounted demonstrator, SAR imaging of the ground surface are carried out for the first time as we known. The real data are processed with motion compensation and imaging algorithms to demonstrate system’s imaging ability. Results indicate that a high two-dimensional resolution of 3 cm (range direction) $\times $ 4 cm (cross-range direction) is achieved, verifying the potential of MWP SAR for the applications in moving target detection and earth observation.