Rotorcraft-borne 3D forward-looking MIMO SAR autofocusing

Abstract

This paper considers the autofocusing problem for a rotorcraft-borne forward-looking multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. Autofocusing is critically important for forward-looking MIMO SAR imaging, since the radar position errors due to the limited precision of navigation systems can severely degrade the imaging quality. In this paper, we propose a novel autofocusing method to address the radar position errors, resulting from both translational and rotational motion errors, for forward-looking MIMO SAR imaging. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed autofocusing algorithm are demonstrated by using several numerical experiments.