A Robust Motion Compensation Approach for UAV SAR Imagery

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an essential tool for modern remote sensing applications. Owing to its size and weight constraints, UAV is very sensitive to atmospheric turbulence that causes serious trajectory deviations. In this paper, a novel databased motion compensation (MOCO) approach is proposed for the UAV SAR imagery. The approach is implemented by a three-step process: 1) The range-invariant motion error is estimated by the weighted phase gradient autofocus (WPGA), and the nonsystematic range cell migration function is calculated from the estimate for each subaperture SAR data; 2) the retrieval of the range-dependent phase error is executed by a local maximum-likelihood WPGA algorithm; and 3) the subaperture phase errors are coherently combined to perform the MOCO for the full-aperture data. Both simulated and real-data experiments show that the proposed approach is appropriate for highly precise imaging for UAV SAR equipped with only low-accuracy inertial navigation system.