Microlocal Analysis of SAR Imaging of a Dynamic Reflectivity Function

In this article we consider four particular cases of Synthetic Aperture Radar imaging with moving objects. In each case, we analyze the forward operator F and the normal operator F ∗F , which appear in the mathematical expression for the recovered reflectivity function (i.e. the image). In general, by applying the backprojection operator F ∗ to the scattered waveform (i.e. the data), artifacts appear in the reconstructed image. In the first case, the full data case, we show that F ∗F is a pseudodifferential operator which implies that there is no artifact. In the other three cases, which have less data, we show that F ∗F belongs to a class of distributions associated to two cleanly intersecting Lagrangians Ip,l(∆,Λ), where Λ is associated to a strong artifact. At the and of the article, we show how to microlocally reduce the strength of the artifact.