In conventional polar format algorithm (PFA), the effective imaging scene is bounded to a limited region near the reference point unless postprocessing is utilized. In a previous paper, refocusing and zoom-in PFA (RZPFA) for curvilinear spotlight SAR imaging were proposed to produce a refocused image for an arbitrary region of interest (ROI) with constant elevation. However, for certain applications, the residual distortion and defocus caused by rugged terrain could not be ignored. In this article, RZPFA is adapted to incorporate the known digital elevation model (DEM) into the imaging process, which is named as orthorectified PFA (OPFA). With just little additional computations than RZPFA, OPFA can realize georeferenced orthorectified imaging via a nonuniform fast Fourier transform of type 3 (NuFFT-3) without the need of postprocessing. The quantitative metrics for the residual DEM distortion and residual DEM defocus were also derived to determine the effective imaging extent of OPFA. Within the effective extent, the proposed OPFA can obtain an orthorectified image efficiently, and the image has a very high quality comparable to backprojection (BP). The imaging results of measured echo and DEM data demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Index Terms-Digital elevation model (DEM), georeferenced imaging, nonuniform fast Fourier transform, orthorectified synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, polar format algorithm (PFA).
I. INTRODUCTIONT HE past decades have witnessed an ever-increasing development in the fields of remote sensing [1], among which synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is of great importance for its unique all-day, all-weather sensing capability [2]. Similar to many other fields, the research of SAR has also entered the era of image processing based on deep learning [3], and commercial SAR startups are springing up [4], [5]. The research in SAR imaging has focused on algorithms for novel modes, such as bistatic SAR [6], multistatic SAR [7], multiple input multiple output SAR (MIMO-SAR