Processing of Monostatic SAR Data With General Configurations

In the traditional model of monostatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the flying platform should have a uniform linear trajectory. In practice, the flight path of the SAR platform, which is highly nonlinear or curvy caused by 3-D velocity and acceleration, cannot be used in the traditional model. In this paper, a geometrical model of the monostatic SAR with general configurations is graphically illustrated by vector notation. Moreover, the gradient method is utilized to point out the effects of the motion parameters, namely, velocity vector and acceleration vector, on total bandwidth and image resolution. Based on the accurate model, a general frequency-domain algorithm, with the incorporations of pre- and postprocessing, is proposed to focus the raw data. Applicability is studied through theoretical analysis and numerical experiments. All these general analyses can be applied to different realizations of monostatic SAR mode, including spotlight SAR, sliding spotlight SAR, and Terrain Observation by Progressive Scans (TOPS) SAR.