Orthorectified Polar Format Algorithm for Generalized Spotlight SAR Imaging With DEM

In conventional polar format algorithm (PFA), the effective imaging scene is bounded to a limited region near the reference point unless postprocessing is utilized. In a previous paper, refocusing and zoom-in PFA (RZPFA) for curvilinear spotlight SAR imaging were proposed to produce a refocused image for an arbitrary region of interest (ROI) with constant elevation. However, for certain applications, the residual distortion and defocus caused by rugged terrain could not be ignored. In this article, RZPFA is adapted to incorporate the known digital elevation model (DEM) into the imaging process, which is named as orthorectified PFA (OPFA). With just little additional computations than RZPFA, OPFA can realize georeferenced orthorectified imaging via a nonuniform fast Fourier transform of type 3 (NuFFT-3) without the need of postprocessing. The quantitative metrics for the residual DEM distortion and residual DEM defocus were also derived to determine the effective imaging extent of OPFA. Within the effective extent, the proposed OPFA can obtain an orthorectified image efficiently, and the image has a very high quality comparable to backprojection (BP). The imaging results of measured echo and DEM data demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.