Estimation of Aircraft Altitude Based on Squint Mode SAR Data

Author

Tao Zeng ; Yinghe Li ; Zegang Ding ; Luosi Liu ; Fei Zou

Author_Institution

Sch. of Inf. & Electron., Beijing Inst. of Technol., Beijing, China

Volume

12

Issue

1

fYear

2015

fDate

Jan. 2015

Firstpage

135

Lastpage

139

Abstract

The aircraft altitude relative to the illuminated region is a significant parameter for the geometric correction in squint mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. Error in the parameter causes geometric distortion, which degrades the image quality. To circumvent this problem, a relative altitude estimator (RAE) is proposed based on the relationship between the relative aircraft altitude and the range variation of the Doppler centroid. The high performance of the RAE is investigated compared to the Cramér-Rao lower bound of the relative aircraft altitude. Finally, the effectiveness of the RAE in practical applications is verified by real data processing.

Keywords

radar imaging; synthetic aperture radar; Cramer-Rao lower bound; Doppler centroid; geometric correction; geometric distortion; illuminated region; image quality; range variation; real data processing; relative aircraft altitude; relative altitude estimator; squint mode SAR data; squint mode synthetic aperture radar imaging; Accuracy; Aircraft; Atmospheric modeling; Azimuth; Doppler effect; Estimation; Synthetic aperture radar; Cramér–Rao lower bound (CRLB); Cram??r???Rao lower bound (CRLB); doppler centroid variation; geometric correction; relative altitude estimator (RAE); squint mode SAR; synthetic aperture radar (SAR);

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1545-598X

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LGRS.2014.2329292

Filename

6840954