Spaceborne Sparse SAR Imaging Mode Design: From Theory to Implementation

To satisfy the requirement of the modern spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, SAR imaging mode design makes a trade-off between resolution and swath coverage by controlling radar antenna sweeping. Existing spaceborne SAR systems can perform earth observation missions well in various modes, but they still face challenges in data acquisition, storage, and transmission, especially for high-resolution wide-swath imaging. In the past few years, sparse signal processing technology has been introduced into SAR to try to solve these problems. In addition, sparse SAR imaging shows huge potential to improve system performance, such as offering wider swath coverage and higher recovered image quality. In this paper, the design scheme of spaceborne sparse SAR imaging modes is systematically introduced. In the mode design, we first design the beam positions of the sparse mode based on the corresponding traditional mode. Then, the essential parameters are calculated for system performance analysis based on radar equations. Finally, a sparse SAR imaging method based on mixed-norm regularization is introduced to obtain a high-quality image of the considered scene from the data collected by the designed sparse modes. Compared with the traditional mode, the designed sparse mode only requires us to obtain a wider swath coverage by reducing the pulse repetition rate (PRF), without changing the existing on-board system hardware. At the same time, the reduction in PRF can significantly reduce the system data rate. The problem of the azimuth ambiguity signal ratio (AASR) increasing from antenna beam scanning can be effectively solved by using the mixed-norm regularization-based sparse SAR imaging method.