Sub-aperture phase error stitching for full aperture airborne SAL data processing method based on azimuth deramp

Synthetic Aperture Ladar (SAL) is a combination of synthetic aperture and lidar. At present, sub-aperture stitching with PGA algorithm is used to realize SAL imaging. However, this algorithm has a low rate of data utilization, resulting in a worse image SNR and resolution. For solving this problem, a method of sub-aperture phase error stitching for full aperture airborne SAL data processing based on azimuth deramp is proposed in this paper. The data is divided into a sequence of sub-apertures and the standard Standard Minimum Entropy Autofocus (MEA) is used to estimate the phase error of each sub-aperture. Then all the phase errors of the sub-apertures are stitched to obtain the full-aperture phase error. After the compensation of the full-aperture phase error, the full-aperture image is obtained by deramp. Compared with the SAL image obtained by sub-aperture algorithm, the method we proposed can offer better resolution and SNR. Finally, the imaging results of airborne SAL real data verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.