Study on Full Aperture Imaging Algorithm for Airborne TOPS Mode

The beam-scan allows the terrain observation by progressive scans (TOPS) mode to cover large azimuthal scenes in a short time, which also causes aliasing in both Doppler domain and azimuth time domain. In the TOPS mode, the most popular solution to overcome the aliasing problem is the “sub-aperture” method, which introduces sub-aperture partition and stitching operations. Aiming at an airborne digital array frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) SAR system, this paper discusses the removal of azimuth aliasing in the TOPS mode based on a full aperture imaging structure, by analyzing the Doppler characteristics of the echo signal of the airborne TOPS mode, the aliasing problem in the Doppler domain is avoided by properly setting system working parameters, which simplifies the imaging procedure; in addition, drawing up the idea of the de-rotation operation, we propose an improved frequency scaling algorithm, which removes the aliasing in the azimuth time domain without increasing the amount of processing data, and the algorithm contains only fast Fourier transformation and complex multiplication operations. The simulation results show that the algorithm can achieve the well-focused images of the airborne TOPS mode even in the case of serious aliasing in the azimuth time domain.