Trade-Off between Motion Measurement Accuracy and Autofocus Capabilities in Airborne SAR Motion Compensation

When processing airborne SAR data, motion compensation is an unavoidable step. Accurate motion compensation requires the knowledge of the exact position of the platform at each pulse. This paper studies the trade-off between two approaches. The first approach is to get the most accurate position estimation as possible to be able to perform the motion compensation with correct input data. The second approach is to accept a less accurate position estimation and to analyze in which way an autofocus algorithm is able to compensate position measurement errors.