Motion compensation using joint-sub-band phase unwrapping for synthetic aperture sonar

Abstract

Displaced phase center antenna (DPCA) micro-navigation has been widely applied in the motion compensation of synthetic aperture sonars (SASs). Estimating the time delay is the most important step for DPCA-based motion compensation. However, at present, the existing methods of estimating the time delay in motion compensation are not sufficiently accurate, which limits the improvement of imaging quality of SASs. This paper proposes a time delay estimation method using joint-sub-band phase unwrapping, which achieves much higher estimation accuracy than the reference method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method dramatically improves the SAS imaging quality, compared to the reference method.