Trajectory deviations in airborne SAR: analysis and compensation

This paper concerns the analysis and compensation of trajectory deviations in airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems. Analysis of the received data spectrum is carried out with respect to the system geometry in the presence of linear, sinusoidal, and general aircraft displacements. This shows that trajectory deviations generally produce spectral replicas along the azimuth frequency that strongly impair the quality of the focused image. Based on the derived model, we explain the rationale of the motion compensation (MOCO) strategy that must be applied at the SAR processing stage in order to limit the resolution loss. To this end aberration terms are separated into range space invariant and variant components. The former can be accounted for either in a preprocessing step or efficiently at range compression stage. The latter needs a prior accommodation of range migration effect. We design the procedure for efficient inclusion of the MOCO within a high precision scaled FT based SAR processing algorithm. Finally, we present results on simulated data aimed at validating the whole analysis and the proposed procedure.