The Modified Antenna Pattern Phase Error Estimation Method for Multichannel SAR Systems in Azimuth

With the combination of digital beamforming(DBF)processing, multichannel synthetic aperture radar(SAR) systems in azimuth promise well in high-resolution and wide-swath imaging, whereas channel errors especially phase errors have a great influence on image quality. This paper brings up a modified antenna pattern method which utilizes the statistic covariance matrix and the antenna pattern to estimate adjacent channel phase errors first, and then phase errors relative to the referenced channel can be calculated more accurately. The computational load of this method is little and it can achieve good performance even under nonuniform sampling. The experiments with real measured data demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.