To obtain high resolution and wide swath (HRWS) image, the azimuth multi-channel technique has been widely used in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems to overcome the contradiction between wide swath and high pulse repetition frequency (PRF). For high image quality, channel mismatch correction is an essential step in multi-channel SAR data imaging. However, in the case of airborne multi-channel SAR, motion errors will severely degrade the performance of channel mismatch correction. To deal with this problem, this paper proposes an improved airborne multi-channel SAR imaging method with motion compensation (MOCO) and range-variant channel mismatch correction. Firstly, motion errors are compensated based on resampling and phase compensation. Then the time delay error and constant gain-phase error between channels are estimated and corrected, followed by range-variant phase error correction based on a novel range-down-sampling method, which reduces the influence of motion errors on channel mismatch correction significantly. Finally, simulated and real data processing results are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.