On the influence of windowing on the SNR maximizing antenna pattern for widebeam SAR techniques

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) techniques provide a means of obtaining reflectivity images of a scene to be investigated. The value of a pixel corresponding to a target is a weighted average of the target reflectivity over the aspect angles considered. The weights are determined by the windowing function used in the imaging algorithm and are chosen depending on the actual purpose of the imaging system. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the pixel corresponding to the target is influenced by the antenna pattern and the window. The paper presents a way to determine the SNR maximizing antenna pattern for given weights and quantifies the benefit of matching the antenna pattern to the window.