A Fast BP Algorithm With Wavenumber Spectrum Fusion for High-Resolution Spotlight SAR Imaging

This letter presents the accelerated fast backprojection (AFBP) algorithm for high-resolution spotlight synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. In conventional fast backprojection (FBP) algorithms, image-domain interpolation is employed in the subaperture (SA) fusion. However, in AFBP, by using a unified polar coordinate (UPC) system, the interpolation-based fusion is substituted by fusing the SA spectra in the wavenumber (WN) spectrum domain. The WN-domain SA fusion is efficiently implemented by fast Fourier transform and circular shifting. In this letter, an accurate impulse response function and the WN spectrum expression of the backprojected image in the UPC are explicitly derived, and furthermore, the implementations of AFBP are investigated in detail. Compared with conventional FBP algorithms, the AFBP can precisely focus on high-resolution SAR data with dramatically improved efficiency. Both simulation and real-measured data experiments validate the superiorities of AFBP by comparing it with the fast factorization backprojection (FFBP) algorithm.