Blocked Azimuth Spectrum Reconstruction Algorithm for Onboard Real-Time Dual-Channel SAR Imaging

Dual-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a widely used technology to achieve high-resolution and wide-swath imaging in current SAR system. Due to the fact of nonuniform sampling and spectrum ambiguity, the Doppler spectrum must be reconstructed before focusing. However, the traditional spectrum reconstruction algorithms require large onboard storage memory and computational resources and hence, make it hard to realize real-time processing. To solve the problem, this letter proposes a blocked spectrum reconstruction algorithm for onboard real-time imaging. Different from the traditional ones, the new method updates parameters block by block in azimuth, and hence, reducing the storage and computational resources at the cost of sacrificing the accuracy of the spectrum reconstruction to some extent. Fortunately, the accuracy loss is acceptable under properly set focusing depth, i.e., azimuth block width. The simulation and real data experiments verify the proposed approach.