ASTC-MIMO-TOPS Mode with Digital Beam-Forming in Elevation for High-Resolution Wide-Swath Imaging

Remote Sensing

Pingping Huang²  Wei Xu¹  Gonzalo Pajares Martinsanz³  Richard Müller³ 

[1] Department of Spaceborne Microwave Remote Sensing, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IECAS), Beijing 100190, China; E-Mail:;College of Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia University of Technology, Hohhot 010051, China;id="af1-remotesensing-07-02952">1College of Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia University of Technology, Hohhot 010051, Chi

关键词: synthetic aperture radar (SAR);    high-resolution wide-swath (HRWS);    Terrain Observation by Progress Scans (TOPS);    multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO);    digital beam-forming (DBF);   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs70302952

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Future spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) missions require complete and frequent coverage of the earth with a high resolution. Terrain Observation by Progressive Scans (TOPS) is a novel wide swath mode but has impaired azimuth resolution. In this paper, an innovative extended TOPS mode named Alamouti Space-time Coding multiple-input multiple-output TOPS (ASTC-MIMO-TOPS) mode combined with digital beam-forming (DBF) in elevation and multi-aperture SAR signal reconstruction in azimuth is proposed. This innovative mode achieves wide-swath coverage with a high geometric resolution and also overcomes major drawbacks in conventional MIMO SAR systems. The data processing scheme of this imaging scheme is presented in detail. The designed system example of the proposed ASTC-MIMO-TOPS mode, which has the imaging capacity of a 400 km wide swath with an azimuth resolution of 3 m, is given. Its system performance analysis results and simulated imaging results on point targets demonstrate the potential of the proposed novel spaceborne SAR mode for high-resolution wide-swath (HRWS) imaging.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.