Focusing bistatic synthetic aperture radar using dip move out

The appearance of new synthetic aperture radar (SAR) acquisition techniques based on opportunity sources enhances interest in bistatic geometries. In seismic data acquisition, each source is currently accompanied by up to 10 000 receivers, and in the last two decades, the bistatic geometry has been carefully studied by scores of authors. Rather then introducing new focusing techniques, within the first-order Born approximation (no multiple reflections), seismic bistatic acquisitions are transformed into monostatic ones using a simple operator named "dip move out" (DMO). In essence, the elliptical locus of the reflectors corresponding to a spike in the bistatic survey is forward modeled as if observed in a monostatic one. The outcome of the model, the so-called smile, is a short operator, slowly time varying but space stationary. To transform a bistatic survey into a monostatic one, it is enough to convolve the initial dataset with this smile. Based on the well-known similarity between seismic and SAR surveys, DMO is first described in its simple geometric understanding and is then used in the SAR case. The same processing that is being used for movement compensation can be applied to the bistatic to monostatic survey transformation. Synthetic examples are also provided.