Refocusing of Moving Ships in Squint SAR Images Based on Spectrum Orthogonalization

Moving ship refocusing is challenging because the target motion parameters are unknown. Moreover, moving ships in squint synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images obtained by the back-projection (BP) algorithm usually suffer from geometric deformation and spectrum winding. Therefore, a spectrum-orthogonalization algorithm that refocuses moving ships in squint SAR images is presented. First, “squint minimization” is introduced to correct the spectrum by two spectrum compression functions: one to align the spectrum centers and another to translate the inclined spectrum into orthogonalized form. Then, the precise analytic function of the two-dimensional (2D) wavenumber spectrum is derived to obtain the phase error. Finally, motion compensation is performed in the two-dimensional wavenumber domain after the motion parameter is estimated by maximizing the image sharpness. This method has low computational complexity because it lacks interpolation and can be implemented by the inverse fast Fourier translation (IFFT) and fast Fourier translation (FFT). Processing results of simulation experiments and the GaoFen-3 squint SAR data validate the effectiveness of this method.