A motion compensation method for wide-swath synthetic aperture sonar

When the swath of Synthetic Aperture Sonar(SAS) is considerably wide, the spacevariant effect of motion errors becomes remarkable. This space-variant effect makes Displace Phase Center Algorithm(DPCA) invalid. To solve the problem, a motion compensation method for wide-swath SAS is proposed. This method uses mixed modulated Lagrange explicit time delay estimation(MMLETDE) to estimate the time delay between two successive pings of the raw echo data, and then motion errors are fitted by linear regression. After that, the raw echo data can be precisely compensated point by point with the estimations of motion errors.Simulation results show that the proposed method can obtain better motion estimation results than DPCA. The resolution measured on the reconstructed image processed by the proposed method is very close to the theoretical resolution. The lake trail results of high frequency and low frequency SAS data show that the quality of the images of the terrain area and small targets is significantly improved.