Short communicationEfficient forward-looking imaging via synthetic bandwidth azimuth modulation imaging radar for high-speed platform

- Synthetic bandwidth azimuth modulation imaging radar (SBAMIR) is proposed.
- Azimuth modulation will bring in additional modulation bandwidth.
- Azimuth resolution is determined by the time bandwidth product (TBP).

This paper deals with the forward-looking imaging problem under high-speed platform for the airborne single-channel forward-looking radar (ASFLR). Biphase-based synthetic bandwidth azimuth modulation imaging radar (Bi-SBAMIR) can be used to increase the azimuth resolution. However, the performance degrades significantly when the velocity of the platform is high. To solve this problem, a more generalized SBAMIR framework based on linear frequency modulation (LFM) waveform (LFM-SBAMIR) is proposed. The LFM waveform is more Doppler tolerant than the biphase waveform, which makes it a good choice for high speed platform. In LFM-SBAMIR, the synthetic bandwidth of the received signal has two parts: the modulation bandwidth and the Doppler bandwidth. Therefore, large synthetic bandwidth can be achieved by increasing the modulation bandwidth even in the case of small Doppler bandwidth, and high azimuth resolution can be achieved after matched filtering. Moreover, it is firstly proved that the azimuth resolution is proportional to the time bandwidth product (TBP) of the modulated LFM waveform. Finally, the azimuth resolution performance under different TBPs, SNRs and velocities are analyzed. The performance assessment conducted by resorting to simulated data, also in comparison to the previously proposed Bi-SBAMIR method, has confirmed the effectiveness of the newly proposed algorithm in high-speed platform scenarios.