GPU-Accelerated Enhanced Resolution 3-D SAR Imaging With Dynamic Metamaterial Antennas

Dynamic metamaterial antennas (DMAs) offer the potential to generate diverse beam patterns with less hardware complexity than traditional electronic beam steering arrays. This paper describes an enhanced resolution stripmap mode (ERSM) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) approach for 3-D imaging with DMAs, which achieves an improved resolution in all dimensions while maintaining a larger scene size than spotlight SAR approaches. Because 3-D ERSM SAR accumulates a large number of measurements, image reconstruction is a computationally complex process. GPU-accelerated partitioned inverse (PI) algorithms are extended to allow for the fast 3-D ERSM SAR image reconstruction. Laboratory experiments using a commercial prototype DMA are presented, which show an improvement of 26% and 42% in cross-range resolution and ground-range resolution, respectively, compared with standard SM SAR. Furthermore, the PI reconstruction results in a speedup of 23.5 versus the commonly used matched filter approach.