Study of Effects of Flat Surface Assumption to Synthetic Aperture Radar Time-domain Algorithms Imaging Quality

Time-domain algorithms have great application prospect in Ultra Wide Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (UWB SAR) imaging for its advantages such as perfect focusing and perfect motion compensation. We could adopt the flat surface assumption to simplify the imaging geometric model, when undulating terrain is imaged using time-domain algorithms. Nevertheless, the flat surface assumption leads to geometric errors, thereby affecting the imaging results. This paper studies the effects of this assumption on time-domain imaging algorithms, points out that it leads to position offset problem in the case of linear aperture, and it even leads to target defocusing problem in the case of non-linear aperture. The expression of position offset is given in this paper, as well as the restriction of the maximal offset of the non-linear aperture and the maximum elevation of the area in order to focus the targets. The conclusions are validated by simulated data, which is processed by one kind of time-domain algorithms, namely Back Projection (BP) algorithm.