SYNTHETIC-APERTURE RADAR IMAGING FROM PHASE-CORRUPTED DATA

A new method to accurately reconstruct a synthetic aperture radar comp lex image starting from raw received data whose phase is affected by p ropagation in the turbulent atmosphere and/or by motion instability of the platform carrying out the antenna is presented. It is based on th e inversion of the, nonlinear relationship between the raw data square amplitude distribution and the unknown complex reflectivity of the sc enario. The unknown complex reflectivity is found by minimising a prop er functional using the partial phase information carried out by the p hase-corrupted raw data as the initial guess of an iterative procedure . The method, which is capable of compensating for both 1-D and 2-D ph ase errors, has been validated on both simulated data and real data wh ose phase has been corrupted by a simulated phase error. The considera ble accuracy of the final images proves the effectiveness of the propo sed procedure.