Improved DBF Algorithm for Multichannel High-Resolution Wide-Swath SAR

This paper deals with signal reconstruction for multichannel high-resolution wide-swath synthetic aperture radar (HRWS-SAR) systems. One of the commonly used algorithms for processing HRWS-SAR data is Krieger's digital beamforming (DBF) algorithm. This algorithm works quite well for cases with uniform space-time sampling as well as moderately nonuniform sampling. However, for cases with highly nonuniform sampling, Krieger's DBF algorithm in its original form suffers from a severe degradation in the signal-to-noise ratio, and for cases with coinciding sampling, this algorithm even fails to function. In this paper, we will solve these problems such that an improved DBF (IDBF) algorithm is developed. The key of the IDBF algorithm consists of two procedures: The first one implements an operation called ambiguity-index screening, which is based on two novel quantities, termed the equivalent sampling spacing and the effective reconstructed Doppler bandwidth; and the other key procedure implements a Doppler-spectrum weighting based on a newly defined parameter that is termed the maximum-to-minimum ratio of the noise spectrum. Simulation results show that the newly proposed IDBF algorithm shares a pronounced improvement in the imaging performance over Krieger's DBF algorithm. Moreover, simulation results also demonstrate that the IDBF algorithm exhibits a more robust and consistent overall performance than several other existing reconstruction algorithms.