An approach to reduce the number of tracks for MB-SAR 3D imaging

Multi-baseline synthetic aperture radar (MB-SAR) can get the three-dimensional (3D) image of the target by multiple passes. According to the Nyquist sampling criteria, the tracks should be evenly spaced and the number of the tracks is large, however they are hard to achieve in real situation. In this paper, we propose an approach of MB-SAR 3D imaging with sparsely spaced tracks. It can realize 3D imaging with unevenly spaced passes, and the spaces of adjacent tracks can be exceed the Nyquist sampling distance, and the number of passes is reduced. First we analyze the spectrum estimation method for MB-SAR 3D imaging, and obtain the sampling requirement for the passes according to Nyquist sampling criteria. Then we propose an approach to reduce the number of tracks, and give the steps of MB-SAR 3D imaging with sparse MB-SAR data. Finally we give the simulation results for MB-SAR 3D imaging with sparse tracks.