A new Doppler centroid estimation method for high-squint curved-trajectory airborne synthetic aperture radar

The average cross-correlation coefficient (ACCC) is a traditional Doppler centroid estimation (DCE) method applied for complex radar data. Though the ACCC method is accurate enough for moving platforms with small acceleration, it cannot be applied for high-squint curved-trajectory synthetic aperture radar because the accompanied larger acceleration will lead to serious Doppler spectrum expansion and result in Doppler aliasing. To solve this problem, a new DCE method is proposed in the paper for the cases with large acceleration. The performance improvement is achieved by employing an additional compensation for the phase and envelope induced by the acceleration. The presented approach is evaluated by the computer simulations.