Imaging of Airborne Synthetic Aperture Ladar under Platform Vibration Condition

Abstract

This study examines the imaging problems in airborne synthetic aperture ladar with single detector and dual detectors along tracks under platform vibration condition. Because platform vibrations affect imaging processing for short intervals negligibly, a method uniting the subaperture imaging and phase gradient autofocus is considered for single-detector ladar. To obtain long stripmap images in azimuth, the stripmap phase gradient autofocus method and the subaperture image mosaic process using Doppler centroid estimation are used. Their performance is analyzed and compared. Considering the shortage of single-detector ladar, a method based on along-track dual-detector interferometric processing is proposed to estimate and compensate for the vibration phase error. The simulation verifies the effectiveness of the proposed methods.