A Novel Layover Elimination Design Method for Spaceborne HRWS SAR imaging

Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging usually suffers from the challenge of target layover detection compared with the optical images. The tomographic imaging technique can be used for layover detection through three-dimensional signal reconstruction, but high-resolution SAR imaging requires a large number of satellite passes and time costs with unsatisfactory imaging performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel design method for the spaceborne SAR system to realize the high-resolution and wide-swath (HRWS) imaging and eliminate target layover, based on a long aperture antenna of HRWS SAR and digital beam forming (DBF) technology combined with Elliot beamforming, where the principle of beam scanning control and the method of layover energy evaluation are given. Simulation results are conducted to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.