Raw Data-Based Motion Compensation for High-Resolution Sliding Spotlight Synthetic Aperture Radar

For accurate motion compensation (MOCO) in airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, a high-precision inertial navigation system (INS) is required. However, an INS is not always precise enough or is sometimes not even included in airborne SAR systems. In this paper, a new, raw, data-based range-invariant motion compensation approach, which can effectively extract the displacements in the line-of-sight (LOS) direction, is proposed for high-resolution sliding spotlight SAR mode. In this approach, the sub-aperture radial accelerations of the airborne platform are estimated via a well-developed weighted total least square (WTLS) method considering the time-varying beam direction. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated by two airborne sliding spotlight C band SAR raw datasets containing different types of terrain, with a high spatial resolution of about 0.15 m in azimuth.