Estimation and compensation of phase shifts in SAR focusing of spotlight data acquired with discrete antenna steering

Modern spaceborne synthetic aperture radar sensors are able to operate the spotlight mode to achieve very high resolution images at microwave frequencies. This mode is characterized by antenna steering to increase the illumination interval. The steering is carried out by beam switching on bursts during the data acquisition interval. In addition to an unavoidable spectrum modulation in azimuth, phase shifts can occur from burst to burst. In this letter, we describe the problem and a procedure able to estimate the phase shifts based on the image contrast maximization technique for subsequent compensation at the data focusing stage. Results on real data acquired by the COSMO-SkyMed sensor demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.