Synthetic aperture sonar wide-swath motion compensation method combined with yaw correction

The traditional motion compensation methods based on phase compensation in frequency domain are difficult to correct the beam steering caused by attitude errors. To solve this problem, a yaw correction based wide-swath motion compensation method for synthetic aperture sonar is proposed. Firstly, the range-varying nature of time delays is utilized to correct outliers in time delay estimation, thereby improving estimation accuracy and robustness. Secondly, the beam steering caused by yaw is corrected by rotating the real aperture imaging grid during the imaging process of the back-projection algorithm. Finally, the range-varying nature of motion errors is overcome through segmented two-dimensional trajectory estimation and segmented imaging, enabling wide-swath motion compensation. Simulation results show that the proposed method effectively suppresses the widening of the main lobe, elevation of sidelobes, and blurring of point target images caused by yaw errors. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to the reference method, the proposed method significantly improves imaging quality under both small and large yaw angles, effectively corrects motion errors caused by yaw, and achieves accurate imaging for wide-swath mapping.