Topography- and aperture-dependent motion compensation for airborne SAR: A back projection approach

In the area of airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), motion compensation (MOCO) is a crucial technique employed to correct the SAR data affected by nonlinear platform trajectory during data acquisition. Due to range-azimuth coupling and computational burden consideration, MOCO is usually implemented only with respect to range dependent motion errors, which is adequate for SAR systems of moderate aperture length. However, a significantly more accurate SAR processing approach is desired for processing low frequency SAR systems with large aperture lengths, such as P-band. In this paper, we propose a new airborne SAR processing algorithm that considers both the high efficiency of the ω-κ algorithm and the high precision of the back projection algorithm. Experimental results on simulated and actual P-band SAR data are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.