Suppressing Paired Echoes Caused by Stair-Step Antenna Steering in TOPS SAR Imaging

The use of electronically steered antennas in the azimuth dimension typically leads to a staircase-like antenna beam steering law in the Terrain Observation by Progressive Scan (TOPS) wide-swath synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data acquisition mode, which will introduce paired echoes in the focused images. This paper proposes a new approach for removing such paired echoes from TOPS SAR images based on the generalization of the ideal optimum filtering concept, which can be implemented easily in the SAR data processing. Modeling the amplitude-modulated azimuth signal shows that the absolute phase of the introduced paired echoes cannot be determined due to the random rotation angle jump time for each target, which will prevent the precise use of optimum filtering. An extended optimum filtering approach, which is originally proposed for suppressing the azimuth ambiguities in SAR images, is reintroduced in this particular case, and a new approximated and generalized form of the deconvolving filtering in the approach is redefined to accommodate the undetermined phase for both the strongest paired distortion peaks and the other peripheral peaks in the distorted impulse response function (IRF). Simulated data from a TOPS SAR mode with staircase-like beam steering are used to verify the improvement in image quality by using the new method.

A Phase-Preserving Focusing Technique for TOPS Mode SAR Raw Data Based on Conventional Processing Methods

We present a new solution for the phase-preserving focusing of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) raw data acquired through the Terrain Observation with Progressive Scan (TOPS) mode. The proposed algorithm consists of a first interpolation stage of the TOPS raw data, which takes into account the Doppler Centroid frequency variations due to the azimuth antenna steering function, and allows us to unfold the azimuth spectra of the TOPS raw data. Subsequently, the interpolated signals are processed by using conventional phase-preserving SAR focusing methods that exploit frequency domain and spectral analyses algorithms, which are extensively used to efficiently process Stripmap and ScanSAR data. Accordingly, the developed focusing approach is easy to implement. In particular, the presented focusing approach exploits one of the available frequency domain Stripmap processing techniques. The only modification is represented by the inclusion, within the 2D frequency domain focusing step, of a spurious azimuth chirp signal with a properly selected azimuthal rate. This allows us to efficiently carry out the TOPS azimuth focusing through the SPECAN method. Furthermore, an important aspect of this algorithm is the possibility to easily achieve a constant and tunable output azimuth pixel size without any additional computing time; this is a remarkable feature with respect to the full-aperture TOPS-mode algorithms available in the existing literature. Moreover, although tailored on Sentinel-1 (S1) raw data, the proposed algorithm can be easily extended to process data collected through the TOPS mode by different radar sensors. The presented experimental results have been obtained by processing real Sentinel-1 raw data and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.