A novel processing algorithm for multiple elevation beam SAR systems

A novel processing algorithm for multiple elevation beam (MEB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems is presented. MEB SAR is a promising technique to reduce the onboard data amount, and its key processing procedure is subpulse separation which is affected by the topography. In this paper, the echoes received by multiple elevation channels (MEC) are regarded as signals coming from different direction-of-arrive (DOA) angles. Then, the subpulse separation is transformed to DOA estimation. Considering the sparsity of the received signals in spatial domain, the sparse-based DOA estimation algorithm is adopted. After obtaining the DOA angles, the overlapped subpulses are separated. The algorithm can also be applied to other MEC SAR systems. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is confirmed in simulations.