Aperture weighting technique for video synthetic aperture radar

We present a technique for aperture weighting for use in video synthetic aperture radar (SAR). In video SAR the aperture required to achieve the desired cross range resolution typically exceeds the frame rate period. As a result, there can be a significant overlap in the collected phase history used to form consecutive images in the video. Video SAR algorithms seek to exploit this overlap to avoid unnecessary duplication of processing. When no aperture weighting or windowing is used one can simply form oversampled SAR images from the non-overlapping sub-apertures using coherent back projection (or other similar techniques). The resulting sub-aperture images may be coherently summed to produce a full resolution image. A simple approach to windowing for sidelobe control is to weight the sub-apertures during summation of the images. Our approach involves producing two or more weighted images for each sub-aperture which can be linearly combined to approximate any desired aperture weighting. In this method we achieve nearly the same sidelobe control as weighting the phase history data and forming a new image for each frame without losing the computation savings of the sub-aperture image combining approach.