A multichannel receiver application for platform motion compensation in Synthetic Aperture Radar

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an advanced radar technique that provides high resolution radar images from an airborne or spaceborne platform. The quality of the radar image, however, is strongly affected by motion errors of the radar carrier. One of the ways to reduce those effects is to utilize information from carrier onboard sensors (inertial navigational systems - INS) to estimate phase errors and compute phase corrections for the processing algorithm. In order to improve the image quality and reduce the residual phase errors a variety of autofocus techniques is applied. Those are mainly based on estimating phase errors from one channel signal. This paper presents a method to compensate platform motion errors based on application of an auxiliary receiving channel. Simulation results of such a system are presented in the paper.