Processing of Long Integration Time Spaceborne SAR Data with Curved Orbit

Long integration time (LIT) indicates high resolution and/or large scene for spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging and also means that the effects, brought by curved orbit, cannot be ignored. In this paper, considering the curved orbit caused by the relative motion between an SAR sensor in orbit and targets on a rotating planetary surface, the impacts of the LIT on the imaging results are discussed in detail. The analysis suggests that the cross-coupling phase is two-dimensional (2-D) with spatial variation. Employing the 2-D Taylor series expansion, the 2-D linear relationships between the spatially variant and invariant coefficients are derived, which are exploited to improve the echo formulation. Then, we apply the keystone transform (KT) to process the LIT spaceborne SAR data. Unlike the traditional application of the KT, our two proposed methods, which operate, respectively, in azimuth time and azimuth frequency domains, can greatly remove the spatially variant cross-coupling phase. Moreover, implementation considerations including the curved orbit of LIT spaceborne SAR, applicability of two methods, postprocessing for topography error compensation, and computational load are discussed. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the developed focusing approaches.