Abstract
The airborne cross-track three apertures MilliMeter Wave (MMW) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) side-looking three-Dimensional (3D) imaging is investigated in this paper. Three apertures are distributed along the cross-track direction, and three virtual phase centers will be obtained through one-input and three-output. These three virtual phase centers form a sparse array which can be used to obtain the cross-track resolution. Because the cross-track array is short, the cross-track resolution is low. When the system works in side-looking mode, the cross-track resolution and height resolution will be coupling, and the low cross-track resolution will partly be transformed into the height uncertainty. The beam pattern of the real aperture is used as a weight to improve the Peak to SideLobe Ratio (PSLR) and Integrated SideLobe Ratio (ISLR) of the cross-track sparse array. In order to suppress the high cross-track sidelobes, a weighting preprocessing method is proposed. The 3D images of a point target and a simulation scene are achieved to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. And the imaging result of the real data obtained by the cross-track three-baseline MMW InSAR prototype is presented as a beneficial attempt.
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Supported by the National Basic Research Program (973) of China (No. 2009CB72400).
Communication author: Teng Xiumin, born in 1987, female, Master Degree candidate. Science and Technology on Microwave Imaging Laboratory, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
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Teng, X., Li, D., Li, L. et al. Cross-track three apertures millimeter wave SAR side-looking three-dimensional imaging. J. Electron.(China) 29, 375–382 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11767-012-0897-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11767-012-0897-5