Motion correction in synthetic aperture radar using subaperture techniques

Motion correction is required in airborne synthetic aperture radar to generate high quality images. The paper proposes a new motion compensation method based on subaperture techniques which better approximates the space variant of the compensation kernel. Motion errors are averaged and added to the system parameters. Only residual errors remain to be corrected. The subaperture images are compensated independently and added together coherently in the final step to generate a fine resolution image. Simulation results show that the new method outperforms full aperture compensation methods, especially in the case of large motion errors.