Enhanced Forward-Looking Missile-Borne Bistatic SAR Imaging With Electromagnetic Vortex

Bistatic radar possesses the forward-looking imaging performance that conventional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) lacks. Nevertheless, bistatic forward-looking imaging is seriously limited by the motion of the transmitter and receiver, resulting in a restrained resolution. In this work, the method for vortex missile-borne bistatic SAR (BSAR) is proposed, which combines the orbital angular momentum (OAM) beam with the traditional missile-borne BSAR technique to obtain a larger Doppler bandwidth. Higher azimuth resolution is achieved by compensating large spatial range cell migration (RCM) and serious range-azimuth coupling. First, the imaging scene of vortex missile-borne BSAR and the OAM-based echo model are established and deduced. Second, the preprocessing method for amplitude compensation is proposed with the design of the transmitted OAM beam, which improves the uncorrelation between different pulse echoes. Then, the improved range Doppler (RD) algorithm with azimuth compensation factor is proposed for vortex missile-borne BSAR to obtain the super-resolution 2-D reconstruction for the target. Simulation results show that compared with conventional missile-borne BSAR, the proposed vortex missile-borne BSAR possessing the extending Doppler bandwidth can obtain superior azimuth resolution performance with the identical synthetic aperture length situation. Furthermore, this work will contribute to the application for OAM-carrying in the field of radar forward-looking imaging and the development for high-resolution missile-borne BSAR imaging technology.