Time delay estimation for motion compensation and bathymetry of SAS systems

Accurate and reliable time delay estimation methods play a key role in multiple receiver synthetic aperture systems to obtain precise motion error estimates required for the reconstruction of high-resolution imagery. Moreover, time delay estimates have a direct impact on the accuracy of height estimation in bathymetry. For both types of applications, it is crucial to estimate time delays with subsample precision, however, bathymetry additionally necessitates the use of small sample sizes to avoid detail loss in estimating height information of the sea bottom. We show for linear frequency modulated signals that time delay estimation based on adaptive filtering can be applied to obtain more accurate estimates of translational displacements in motion compensation techniques as well as of height estimates in bathymetry.