A Novel Motion Compensation Approach Based on Symmetric Triangle Wave Interferometry for UAV SAR Imagery

The combination of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is attractive for acquiring high-resolution images without the restrictions of time and weather. However, because UAVs are lightweight and small in size, the UAV SAR system is very sensitive to turbulence, resulting in serious trajectory deviations and remaining residual motion errors (RMEs), such as residual range cell migration (RCM) and aperture phase errors (APEs). In this paper, a novel motion compensation (MoCo) strategy is developed based on the symmetric triangle linear frequency modulated continuous wave (STLFMCW) signal. The STLFMCW signal model is first presented, which reveals the relevance between the positive-negative frequency modulations and motion errors. The residual RCMs and relative phase errors are estimated directly through the phase differential interferometry of up-ramp and down-ramp chirp signals, instead of the traditional approach of relying on the range-shift gradient of adjacent range profiles. The proposed approach is independent of conventional prominent point processing (PPP) and calculates the range deviation to avoid the accumulation of errors, thereby achieving high precision and efficiency. Experiments based on simulated and measured data sets validate the proposed approach.