TWO DIMENSION DIGITAL BEAMFORMING PREPROCESSING IN MULTIBEAM SCANSAR

The novel multibeam ScanSAR takes advantage of the displaced phase center multiple azimuth beam (DPCMAB) imaging scheme and intra-pulse beam steering in elevation in ScanSAR to achieve the high-resolution ultra-wide-swath imaging capacity. This letter proposes an innovative two-dimensional (2D) digital beamforming (DBF) space-time preprocessing approach for multibeam ScanSAR. According to echo proprieties of such imaging scheme, both azimuth ambiguity and range ambiguity problems should be resolve before a conventional ScanSAR imaging processor. After range compressing in each receive channel, a 2D DBF processor is carried out in the range-Doppler domain. The azimuth DBF operation is adopted to resolve the azimuth nonuniform sampling problem in multichannel SAR systems, while the DBF preprocessing in elevation is carried out to separate echoes from different subswaths corresponding to different sub-pulses. Imaging results on simulated distributed targets validate the proposed 2D DBF preprocessing approach.