Geosynchronous Spaceborne–Airborne Multichannel Bistatic SAR Imaging Using Weighted Fast Factorized Backprojection Method

Geosynchronous (GEO) spaceborne–airborne bistatic synthetic aperture radar (GEO-BiSAR), where the high-altitude transmitter provides continuous illumination for the receiver, is capable of providing benefits to remote sensing applications. However, obtaining a focused image with high efficiency is a challenging work. The severe 2-D space-variant range cell migration and Doppler modulation introduced by the two moving platforms make the echo hard to be focused. Moreover, the azimuth ambiguity due to the low pulse repetition frequency adopted by the GEO illuminator seriously deteriorates the quality of the final image. In order to simultaneously suppress the azimuth ambiguity and obtain well-focused images, a weighted fast factorized backprojection (FFBP) method is proposed for multichannel GEO BiSAR in this letter. First, the Doppler ambiguity of GEO BiSAR is analyzed and the azimuth multichannel receiving technique is introduced. Then, the multichannel transfer function for GEO BiSAR is derived. Based on the multichannel transfer function, a weighted FFBP method is proposed to achieve accurate focusing and ambiguity suppression. Finally, the simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.