An integrative synchronization and imaging approach for bistatic spaceborne/stratospheric SAR with a fixed receiver

Bistatic spaceborne/stratospheric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with a fixed receiver is a novel hybrid bistatic SAR system, in which a spaceborne SAR serves as the transmitter of opportunity, while a fixed receiver is mounted on a stratospheric platform. This paper presents an integrative synchronization and imaging approach for this particular system. Firstly, a novel synchronization method using the direct-path signal, which can be collected by a dedicated antenna, is proposed and applied. The synchronization error can be completely removed using the proposed method. However, as the cost of synchronization, the characteristic of synchronized echo’s range history becomes quite different from that of general bistatic SAR data. To focus this particular synchronized data, its 2-D spectrum is derived under linear approximations and then a frequency-domain imaging algorithm using two-dimensional inverse scaled Fourier transform (2-DISFT) is proposed. At last, the proposed integrative synchronization and imaging algorithm is verified by simulations.