A Frequency Phase Filtering Imaging Algorithm for Highly Squint Missile-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar with Subaperture

The missile-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) usually adopts the highly squint mode and subaperture to satisfy maneuvering and the real-time processing, but the signal of highly squint SAR is coupled greatly between the azimuth and range. This issue can be solved by removing the range walk in the time domain, but costs the limitation of focus depth. Due to the depth of focus and the characteristics of subaperture, a new subaperture imaging algorithmFrequency Phase Filtering Algorithm (FPFA) is proposed in this paper. Without any approximation of the slant range, the range walk can be done in the time domain and the range curvature removed in the frequency domain. Then, a new high-order equation of phase filtering factor is introduced into the frequency domain in order to correct the azimuth-dependence. Finally, the signal is focused in the Doppler domain by SPECtral ANalysis (SPECAN) technique. Both the simulation results and real data processing validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.