Focus Improvement of Highly Squinted Data Based on Azimuth Nonlinear Scaling

Since synthetic aperture technology was employed in radar signal processing, the information capability of radar has greatly been enhanced. A lot of imaging algorithms have also been developed. However, the high-resolution imaging for highly squinted synthetic aperture radar data is still a difficult issue due to large range migration and strong range dependence on the secondary range compression term that is relatively large and cubic with high focusing sensibilities for high resolution. To accommodate for this problem, the "squint-minimization" operation and azimuth nonlinear chirp scaling (CS) (ANCS) operation are studied in this paper. On the basis of these operations, we propose new imaging algorithms and analyze the characteristic of highly squinted data and the difficulty in focusing these data as well as discussing the principle of ANCS. We also introduce a new CS algorithm, and numerical examples show that the proposed algorithm is able to achieve 0.1 m of resolution under a squint angle as large as 70°s.