Unconventional Sources of Error in High-Resolution Wide-Swath SAR Systems based on Scan-On-Receive

Abstract

The scan-on-receive (SCORE) is a key digital beamforming (DBF) technique for future high-resolution wide-swath synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems. A sharp and high gain receive beam, steered in real time towards the expected direction of arrival (DoA) of the backscattering signal, allows for improved SAR imaging performance with respect to a conventional approach. Nevertheless, it also exposes the system to new errors, associated with a mismatch between the expected and the actual DoA. This paper identifies possible sources of error, specific of SCORE-based systems, and investigates their effect on the SAR image quality in dependence of instrument and geometrical parameters.