AIRBORNE SYNTHETIC-APERTURE ACOUSTIC IMAGING

This paper presents a system model and inversion for airborne syntheti c aperture acoustic (SAA) imaging, The system model accurately represe nts the intercation of the acoustic source and the target region at ne ar range values. Moreover, the model incorporates the fact that the re lative speed of the vehicle's (transmitter/receiver) with respect to t he target region is comparable to the acoustic wave propagation speed, The inversion utilizes the principle of spectral decomposition of sph erical phase functions to develop a wavefront reconstruction method fr om SAA data, Processing issues and selection of appropriate acoustic F R-I-CW sources are discussed, Results are provided that exhibit the su perior accuracy of the proposed SAA system model and inversion over th eir synthetic aperture radar (SAR) counterpart in which the vehicle's speed is assumed to be much smaller than the wave propagation speed.