Spaceborne Interrupted Frequency Modulation Continuous Wave SAR Imaging Based on Accumulated Aperture Interpolation Technique

The Intermittent Frequency Modulation Continuous Wave (IFMCW) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mode solves the problem that the spaceborne Frequency Modulation Continuous Wave (FMCW) SAR must be bistatic by alternately transmitting and receiving signals in different time intervals. However, in this mode, the radar antenna will work intermittently in the transmitting and receiving state, resulting in periodical gaps in the echo data. In order to solve the above problems, a Missing-data Iterative Adaptive imaging processing Approach (MIAA) is proposed, based on Accumulated Aperture Interpolation Technique (AAIT) to recover the data gaps. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively recover missing data, thus improving significantly imaging quality and suppressing greatly the artifacts energy caused by the periodical data gaps.