PHASE GRADIENT AUTOFOCUS - A ROBUST TOOL FOR HIGH-RESOLUTION SAR PHASE CORRECTION

The phase gradient autofocus (PGA) technique for phase error correction of spotlight mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is examined carefully in the context of four fundamental signal processing steps that constitute the algorithm. We demonstrate that excellent results over a wide variety of scene content, and phase error function structure are obtained if and only if all of these steps are included in the processing. Finally, we show that the computational demands of the full PGA algorithm do not represent a large fraction of the total image formation problem, when mid to large size images are involved.