| Summary: | Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a promising scheme for high-resolution wide-swath (HRWS) imaging. After echo separation processing, a MIMO-SAR system can provide many equivalent phase centers (EPCs) in azimuth. However, EPC duplication occurs for traditional monostatic systems with uniform antenna arrays, leading to system resource waste. Moreover, range ambiguity suppression is a necessary process for wide-swath SAR systems. In this paper, a novel MIMO-SAR echo separation and range ambiguity suppression processing framework is proposed for HRWS imaging. A set of transmission delays is introduced to the transmit channels to displace the repetitive EPCs. The transmission delays can also be used to flexibly control the performance of echo separation. A wide-null beamformer is employed to accomplish echo separation and ambiguity suppression simultaneously. The proposed framework is designed for real-time processing and therefore does not require frequency-domain operations. Finally, the proposed framework is verified through point target and distributed scene simulation experiments.
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