MULTI-APERTURE FOCUSING IN SPACEBORNE TRANSMITTER-STATIONARY RECEIVER BISTATIC SAR

The paper proposes a methodology to perform azimuth focusing of spaceborne transmitter-stationary receiver bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data across multiple along track apertures to increase azimuth resolution. The procedure uses as input several azimuth apertures (continuous groups of range compressed pulses) from one or more satellite bursts and comprises the following stages: azimuth antenna pattern compensation, slow time resampling, reconstruction of missing azimuth samples between neighbouring sets of pulses using an auto-regressive model and back-projection focusing of the resulting multi-aperture range image. The approach is evaluated with real bistatic data acquired over an area of Bucharest city, Romania.