Analysis of Ship Deformation using the Backprojection Autofocus of Large Ships with Arbitrary Motion for Synthetic Aperture Radar

The quality of a SAR image, which shows a large arbitrarily moving ship, can be improved, if the rotation and the deformation of the ship are taken into account in image formation. Our backprojection autofocus algorithm is the first algorithm, which is able to estimate and to compensate ship rotations and deformations. However, the algorithm requires a predefined number of subimages, a predefined regularization parameter and a predefined interpolation method. This paper analyzes these parameters and shows that compensating the hogging/sagging deformation leads to improved image quality.