Abstract:

A generalized method is proposed to analyze the resolving power of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems, which can evaluate the resolving power of SAR systems with complex trajectory (such as circular, geosynchronous and bistatic SAR) in high efficiency and with high precision. Firstly, the ambiguity function (AF) is deduced and simplified. Then, according to the feature that the shape of the AF between 0 and -3 dB is a parabola, the quartic polynomial is introduced to approximate the AF, which satisfies the precision request. Thus, an analytical expression to evaluate the resolving power of SAR systems is obtained. Finally, simulation experiments of circular SAR, geosynchronous SAR and bi-static SAR validate the proposed method.