Improved Signal Reconstruction Algorithm for Multichannel SAR Based on the Doppler Spectrum Estimation

For high-resolution wide-swath synthetic aperture radar imaging algorithms, signal reconstruction is a key step. The steering vector plays an important role in signal reconstruction, which can be constructed by the ambiguity components. The information of the ambiguity components, e.g., number and index, is usually regarded to be constant and known. However, we find that the information of ambiguity components is always a piecewise function of the baseband frequency. This means that the steering vector cannot be preconstructed accurately and it will negatively affect the signal reconstruction. This paper presents an improved signal reconstruction method based on the Doppler spectrum estimation. The proposed method can estimate the variant ambiguity components to form the steering vector exactly by the Capon estimation. As a result, the method is able to restore the Doppler spectrum entirely and performs well on the noise reduction. Moreover, the baseband Doppler centroid and antenna pattern can be obtained in the proposed method. Simulated data and airborne raw data are processed to validate the algorithm.