Suppression of azimuth ambiguities in spaceborne stripmap SAR using accurate restoration modeling

Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has attracted special interests in many applications, but suffers from image quality degradation caused by azimuth ambiguities. To suppress this phenomenon, different from conventional suppression method, this paper concentrates on the analysis of precise mathematic expression of azimuth ambiguities. Exploiting the specific characteristic of ambiguities, a restoration algorithm to suppress azimuth ambiguities of stripmap SAR is proposed. This method is not sensitive to SNR, and also suitable for distributed targets. Azimuth ambiguities are accurately restored and then cancelled in SAR image. Proposed method has been shown effective by experiments, demonstrating capabilities of removing artifacts and revealing covered targets in stripmap SAR image.