Extended Polar Format Algorithm for Large-Scene High-Resolution WAS-SAR imaging

The polar format algorithm (PFA) is a frequency-domain algorithm with high computational efficiency especially for the high resolution imaging applications in wide-angle staring synthetic aperture radar (WAS-SAR). Because of the image distortion and defocus caused by plane wave assumption, the effective imaging scene is limited to a small region which is defined as the defocus-negligible region. In this article, a novel sub-block imaging algorithm which first applied to WAS-SAR is proposed. This method combines sub-block imaging and spatially variant post-filtering (SVPF) which can not only effectively extend the depth of focus of PFA but also greatly reduces the computational burden. What's more, the method of mosaic image is proposed in this article which can eliminate discontinuity between adjacent sub-blocks. First, the large scene is segmented into multiple regions along range direction and the size of each region is still larger than that of the defocus-negligible region. Second, refocusing is implemented by a phase compensation of the already de-chirped signal with the center of sub-blocks, respectively, and each sub-block image is formed by PFA. Third, the region in each sub-block that exceeds the defocus-negligible region is corrected by SVPF and the image distortion can be corrected by 2-D interpolation. Finally, the mosaic image method is applied to get the large-scene image with high quality. The algorithm proposed in this article is efficient and solves the problems in the process of SAR image mosaic such as dislocation and grayscale differences. The simulated and experimental data results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed algorithm.