A Fast Cartesian Back-Projection Algorithm based on Ground Surface Grid for GEO SAR Focusing

Geosynchronous-earth-orbit (GEO) SAR provides excellent continuous observing capability and large swath. How-ever, the extremely long synthetic aperture time, the curved orbit and the nonplanar ground surface cause serious spatial variance in the GEO SAR signal. In this paper, a novel fast Cartesian Back Projection (BP) algorithm based on sub-aperture imaging on ground and multi-stage fusion is proposed for accurately and efficiently imaging of GEO SAR. The imaging grids are arranged on the ground surface to avoid the azimuth defocusing caused by flat-ground-approximation. Then, a new two-step spectrum compression method is derived to solve the spectrum aliasing of sub-aperture images. And a multi-stage image fusion method is adopted to combine all the sub-aperture images with high efficiency. The computational complexity and the approximation of the proposed algorithm are also discussed. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.