Feature Preserving Autofocus Algorithm for Phase Error Correction of SAR Images

Autofocus is an essential technique for airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging to correct phase errors mainly due to unexpected motion error. There are several well-known conventional autofocus methods such as phase gradient autofocus (PGA) and minimum entropy (ME). Although these methods a...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Haemin Lee, Chang-Sik Jung, Ki-Wan Kim
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-03-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/7/2370
Description
Summary:Autofocus is an essential technique for airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging to correct phase errors mainly due to unexpected motion error. There are several well-known conventional autofocus methods such as phase gradient autofocus (PGA) and minimum entropy (ME). Although these methods are still widely used for various SAR applications, each method has drawbacks such as limited bandwidth of estimation, low convergence rate, huge computation burden, etc. In this paper, feature preserving autofocus (FPA) algorithm is newly proposed. The algorithm is based on the minimization of the cost function containing a regularization term. The algorithm is designed for postprocessing purpose, which is different from the existing regularization-based algorithms such as sparsity-driven autofocus (SDA). This difference makes the proposed method far more straightforward and efficient than those existing algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better performance, convergence, and robustness than the existing postprocessing autofocus algorithms.
ISSN:1424-8220