Nail Cadalli,  Jung Ah C. Lee, and David C. Munson, Jr.

We consider the problem of high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging of a runway and environs from an aircraft approaching for landing. We show that traditional plane-wave approximation, which leads to a simple and fast inversion scheme, is not accurate enough for this scenario and that the geometry of data collection requires the incorporation of the wavefront into the processing for high-resolution. Wavenumber-domain SAR inversion methods, such as omega-k algorithm, successfully take into account the curvature of the wavefront. It has been shown for the broadside and slightly squinted cases that the omega-k method outperforms the polar-format processing. In the highly squinted case of runway imaging, due to the severe geometric distortions the omega-k algorithm shows certain aberrations depending on the accuracy of the wavenumber-domain interpolation. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using the omega-k algorithm, for runway imaging.  Also, we compare the results of the omega-k algorithm with those of a general SAR inversion method.

To be submitted to IEEE Trans. Aerosp.  Electron. Syst.