Airborne Forward-Looking Radar Super-Resolution Imaging Using Iterative Adaptive Approach

Airborne forward-looking radar (AFLR) imaging has raised many concerns in fields of Earth observation, independent of weather and daytime. Constrained by imaging principles, conventional high-resolution radar imaging techniques such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and Doppler beam sharpening (DBS) are incapable of AFLR imaging. The real aperture radar (RAR) can obtain AFLR images using a scanning antenna, but suffers from coarse cross-range resolution. Recently, there has been much attention paid to the iterative adaptive approach (IAA), which draws from the benefits of RAR imaging and provides improved cross-range resolution. However, earlier work on the IAA imposed a convolution model on the received azimuth echo, neglecting the effect of the Doppler phase. This model mismatch degrades the imaging performance for moving platforms. To settle this problem, this paper first establishes a Doppler-convolution model of AFLR imaging, where both Doppler phase and antenna convolution effects are considered, allowing more accurate reconstruction when applying the IAA to formulate a super-resolution image. Then, a data-depended approach for Doppler centroid estimation is proposed to circumvent the problem of low estimation precision using platform motion parameters delivered by navigational devices mounted on the radar platform. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed implementation of the IAA based on the Doppler-convolution model and Doppler centroid estimation can overcome the deficiencies of the SAR and DBS techniques in the forward-looking imaging direction, and present a noticeably superior performance as compared with conventional AFLR imaging methods.