A Generalized Continuous Wave Synthetic Aperture Radar

Attention has been devoted to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) for half a century. Though it is a well-proven remote sensing technique, conventional pulsed SAR has several inherent limitations. In this paper, we present a new SAR concept, called Generalized Continuous Wave SAR (GCW-SAR). By using continuous wave signaling, the GCW-SAR system achieves better performance and overcomes the limitations such as the minimum antenna area in conventional SAR. Unlike the frequency modulated continuous wave SAR (FMCW-SAR) system, the GCWSAR image is reconstructed by correlation between the sampled raw data and the location dependent reference signals. A fast image reconstruction algorithm is also presented in the paper. The principle of GCW-SAR and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are validated by numerical simulation results.