MOTION COMPENSATION AND AUTOFOCUS OF RANGE DOPPLER OR BIDIMENSIONAL PROCESSING FOR AIRBORNE SYNTHETIC-APERTURE RADAR/

The airborne use of synthetic aperture radars suffers from difficultie s due to the nonlinearities and the lack of accuracy in the measuring of the carrier trajectory. An autofocus technique (of the map-drift ty pe) and a new method for motion compensation allowing the use of two-d imensional processing for image synthesis are introduced. This latter type of processing is known to provide a more elegant and more efficie nt solution for range migration and range versus Doppler coupling comp ared to classical range/Doppler processing. Trials with the RAMSES air borne SAR of ONERA confirm the interest of the two methods. (C) Elsevi er, Paris.