Abstract
Variable and higher pulse repetition frequencies (PRFs) are increasingly
being used to meet the stricter requirements and complexities of current
airborne and spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems associated with
higher resolution and wider area products. POLYPHASE, the proposed resampling
scheme, downsamples and unifies variable PRFs within a single look complex
(SLC) SAR acquisition and across a repeat pass sequence of acquisitions down to
an effective lower PRF. A sparsity condition of the received SAR data ensures
that the uniformly resampled data approximates the spectral properties of a
decimated densely sampled version of the received SAR data. While experiments
conducted with both synthetically generated and real airborne SAR data show
that POLYPHASE retains comparable performance to the state-of-the-art BLUI
scheme in image quality, a polyphase filter-based implementation of POLYPHASE
offers significant computational savings for arbitrary (not necessarily
periodic) input PRF variations, thus allowing fully on-board, in-place, and
real-time implementation.