Optimization Strategies for Multi-Aperture SAR Imaging With High Performance

Abstract

Multi-aperture synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems enable high performance SAR imaging thus meeting the rising demands of future remote sensing applications that conventional SAR cannot fulfill. To provide constant per­formance even in case of a non-uniformly sam­pled data array in azimuth caused by a non-optimum pulse repetition frequency (PRF), an appropriate coherent proc­essing of the individual aperture signals is needed. An innovative multi-aperture reconstruction algorithm for such a ‘digital beam­forming on receive’ was presented and inves­tigated in -. This paper continues with a system design example to dem­onstrate the algorithm’s capa­bility for high performance imaging. Further, innovative strategies and extended system architectures allowing for optimizing the system perform­ance are introduced and their effectiveness is shown by simulation results. In this context, the theoretical characteri­zation of the impact of the proc­essing on the NESZ is extended to the new concepts.