ABSTRACT
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) altimeters can achieve higher spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than conventional altimeters by Doppler beam sharpening or focused SAR imaging methods. To improve the estimation accuracy of waveform re-tracking, several average echo power models for SAR altimetry have been proposed in previous works. However, these models were mainly proposed for satellite altimeters and are not applicable to high-mobility platforms such as aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and missiles, which may have a large antenna mis-pointing angle and significant vertical movement. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-analytical waveform model and signal processing method for SAR altimeters with vertical movement and large antenna mis-pointing angles. A new semi-analytical expression that can be numerically computed for the flat pulse response (FSIR) is proposed. The 2D delay-Doppler map is then obtained by numerical computation of the convolution between the proposed analytical function, the probability density function, and the time/frequency point target response of the radar. A novel delay compensation method based on sinc interpolation for SAR altimeters with vertical movement is proposed to obtain the multilook echo, which can optimally handle non-integer delays and maintain signal frequency characteristics. In addition, a height estimation method based on least squares (LS) estimation is proposed. The LS estimator does not have an analytical solution, and requires iterative solving through gradient descent. We evaluate the performance of the proposed estimation strategy using simulated data for typical airborne scenarios. When the mis-pointing angles are within 10 degrees, the normalized quadratic error (NQE) of the proposed model is less than 10-10 and the RMSE of τ obtained by the re-tracking method fitted by the proposed model is less than 0.2 m, which indicates the high applicability of the model and accuracy of the re-tracking method.