Suppressing Range Ambiguity for Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar Based on Linearly Constrained Minimum Variance Algorithm

The range ambiguity of the spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is serious, because of the wide swath and the large detection range. This also decreases the radar image quality. Increasing the antenna height can solve this problem. But usually the satellite platform can not load the large antenna. So the range ambiguity suppression is an important problem for the spaceborne SAR. In this paper, the mathematical model of the range ambiguity is presented first. The difference between the average range ambiguity signal ratio (ARASR) and the distributed range ambiguity signal ratio (DRASR) is analyzed. Then an approach of the range ambiguity suppression for the spaceborne SAR based on the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) algorithm is proposed. Simulation results prove that this approach improves not only the ARASR but also the DRASR under the condition that the antenna height is not needed to be changed. This method will be useful for achieving the wide swath