Polar Format Imaging Algorithm With Wave-Front Curvature Phase Error Compensation for Airborne DLSLA Three-Dimensional SAR

Airborne downward-looking sparse linear array 3-D synthetic aperture radar operates nadir observation and obtains the 3-D microwave scatter information of the observed scene. A polar format algorithm (PFA) with space-variant wave-front curvature phase error compensation is presented. A 3-D image in polar coordinate can be obtained with the proposed PFA, and a 3-D image in Cartesian coordinate can be obtained with interpolation. The proposed PFA possesses the advantages of high precision, low memory requirement, and low computational complexity. The focus performance of the proposed PFA is validated by 3-D distributed scene simulation with an airborne X-band digital elevation model and a P-band circular SAR image of the same area as simulation scene input.