The Application of the Principle of Chirp Scaling in Processing Stepped Chirps in Spotlight SAR

A new approach to process stepped chirps in spotlight synthetic aperture radar is presented in this letter, which is based on exploiting the principle of chirp scaling (PCS). In particular, PCS is integrated into the polar format algorithm (PFA), obtaining a more efficient solution compared with the existing polar interpolation technique. The main contribution of this letter is the implementation of azimuth scaling, in which the bandwidth synthesis is embedded. The algorithm is developed dedicatedly for dealing with stepped chirps. The signal processing flow is investigated in detail, in which no interpolations but only fast Fourier transform and complex multiplications are involved. Point-target simulation has validated the new approach and indicated that it is more efficient than the classic interpolation-based one. The achieved computational gain measured in execution time is around 25%-30%.