Airborne SAR passive radar imaging algorithm based on external illuminator

In this paper, we propose an airborne SAR passive radar imaging algorithm which makes use of the regular circular motion by an airplane to form a synthetic aperture in the case of only one external illuminator available. Due to collected data is non-uniform and sparse in the Fourier space, the target scattering function can be reconstructed from the echo data through coordinate conversion, interpolation and two-dimensional Fourier transform. Theory analysis and computer simulation confirm the effectiveness of the algorithm.