Abstract:

 A novel imaging method for synthetic aperture radar(SAR) using the continuous waveform(CW) is presented. Compared with the traditional pulsewaveform SAR and frequencymodulated CW (FM-CW) SAR, which rely on wideband signal transmission to achieve high range resolution, the CW-SAR uses the high Doppler resolution provided by the CW signals to perform the imaging. The data model for the imaging processing is formed by correlating the received signal with a scaled or frequency shifted version of the transmitted CW signal, where the correlated signal is in fact the projection of the scene reflectivity onto the iso Doppler curves. A filtered backprojection image reconstruction method is presented to reconstruct the scene reflectivity using the correlated signals. The proposed imaging method for CW-SAR is applicable to wideband and narrowband CW transmission, and monostatic or bistatic SAR systems. It can also accommodate arbitrary radar platform flight trajectories. The imaging method is discussed in the framework of bistatic configuration, including the performance analysis and the demonstration using numerical simulations.