Synthetic aperture radar autofocus via semidefinite relaxation

The autofocus problem in synthetic aperture radar imaging amounts to estimating unknown phase errors caused by unknown platform or target motion. At the heart of three state-of-the-art autofocus algorithms, namely, phase gradient autofocus, multichannel autofocus (MCA), and Fourier-domain multichannel autofocus (FMCA), is the solution of a constant modulus quadratic program (CMQP). Currently, these algorithms solve a CMQP by using an eigenvalue relaxation approach. We propose an alternative relaxation approach based on semidefinite programming, which has recently attracted considerable attention in other signal processing problems. Experimental results show that our proposed methods provide promising performance improvements for MCA and FMCA through an increase in computational complexity.