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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 54, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2016

First Bistatic Demonstration of Digital Beamforming

in Elevation With TerraSAR-X as an Illuminator
Robert Wang, Senior Member, IEEE, Wei Wang, Yunfeng Shao, Feng Hong, Pei Wang, Yunkai Deng, Member, IEEE,
Zhimin Zhang, and Otmar Loffeld, Senior Member, IEEE

AbstractThe next generation of spaceborne synthetic aperture

radar (SAR) remote sensing systems will emphasize on highresolution and wide-coverage imaging. For these design goals,
digital beamforming (DBF) in elevation is a promising candidate.
DBF-SAR can provide global monitoring capacity for the continuous observation of a highly dynamic and rapidly changing
world with high spatial resolution and short repeat intervals. A
spaceborne experiment regarding a real complex scene and real
spaceborne wave propagation channel effects remains a necessary
step to complete the experimental verification of this advanced
technique. Fortunately, the spacebornestationary bistatic configuration offers a potential chance to validate the advanced technique. The aforementioned experiment can be considered as a test
bed for the development and implementation of DBF radar techniques applicable to Earth observation science and planetary measurements. The DBF experiment based on spacebornestationary
bistatic configuration with TerraSAR-X as an illuminator has
been successfully conducted in June 2013 by the Department of
Space Microwave Remote Sensing System, Institute of Electronics,
Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Index TermsBistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR), digital
beamforming (DBF), TerraSAR-X.

I. I NTRODUCTION

YNTHETIC aperture radar (SAR) is a powerful and

increasingly expanding technique for acquiring highresolution radar images in day-and-night and under all-weather
conditions, and thus is capable of numerous Earth observation
applications, e.g., wide-area surveillance, disaster management,
Earth dynamic monitoring, vegetation and snow mapping, soil
moisture determination, mineral exploration, and urban mapping [1][8]. The foregoing applications require SAR systems with high-resolution and wide-swath imaging. However,

Manuscript received March 12, 2015; revised May 31, 2015; accepted
August 4, 2015. Date of publication October 1, 2015; date of current version
January 19, 2016. This work was supported in part by the German Aerospace
Agency Project under Grant MTH1517, by the National Natural Science Funds
for Excellent Young Scholar under Grant 61422113, and by the Hundred
Talents Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
R. Wang, P. Wang, Y. Deng, and Z. Zhang are with the Department of
Space Microwave Remote Sensing System, Institute of Electronics, Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China (e-mail: yuwang@mail.ie.ac.cn;
ykdeng@mail.ie.ac.cn; zmzhang@mail.ie.ac.cn).
W. Wang, Y. Shao, and F. Hong are with the Department of Space Microwave Remote Sensing System, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy
of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China, and also with the University of Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100039, China.
O. Loffeld is with the Center for Sensor Systems, University of Siegen,
Siegen 57076, Germany (e-mail: loffeld@zess.uni-siegen.de).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TGRS.2015.2467176

conventional SAR systems cannot meet this requirement due

to the fact that the unambiguous swath width and achievable
azimuth resolution pose contradicting requirements on system
design [3], [4].
Therefore, there is a clear incentive for considering ways of
circumventing the inherent operation constraints and technological limitations between the unambiguous range swath and
azimuth resolution and achieving high-resolution SAR imagery
without the coverage loss imposed by the range and azimuth
ambiguities. Recently, a multiple-channel SAR combined with
digital beamforming (DBF) capability has received a great deal
of attention as a promising concept to overcome the aforementioned limitation [9], [10]. The main innovative characteristic of
this promising system concept is the use of multiple channels
in elevation and/or azimuth, where the receiving antenna is
either split into multiple subapertures with independent receiver
channels or the receiver apertures are distributed on multiple
platforms leading to a multistatic SAR [1], [4], [5], [11], [12].
With DBF technology in azimuth, additional azimuth samples
are received for each transmitted signal, which allows for a
reduced pulse repetition frequency and thereby enables a wider
swath of the recorded digital signal [4][6]. For spaceborne
SAR systems based on DBF in elevation, a wide swath could be
illuminated by using a small transmitting antenna, whereas for
reception, a large multiple-channel antenna is used to acquire
data that are processed to form a scanning beam [6]. This
technology can obtain a sharp and high gain pattern, which
follows the pulse echo as it arrives from different directions
as a function of time. This real-time steering direction of the
receive pattern is achieved by selecting the scan angle as a
function of range time [5], [6]. Some of its benefits include
an increase in the measurement swath without reducing the
receiving antenna gain and the suppression of ambiguities or
localized interference in the receiver signal by appropriate null
steering of the antenna pattern. Furthermore, beams can, for
example, be synthesized on both sides of the flight track using
multiple-channel nadir-looking antennas, thus increasing the
coverage area [4][6].
This system concept has been preliminarily verified in a laboratory experiment using a multiple-channel SAR demonstrator
on the ground [13][15] and in an airborne experiment using
the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations L-Band
Digital Beamforming SAR system [10]. Through the aforementioned experiments, the beam formation capability of the
DBF technique has been successfully demonstrated. However,
a spaceborne experiment regarding a real complex scene and
real spaceborne wave propagation channel effects remains a
necessary step to complete the experimental verification of this

0196-2892 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.

WANG et al.: BISTATIC DEMONSTRATION OF DBF IN ELEVATION WITH TerraSAR-X AS AN ILLUMINATOR

843

Fig. 2. Hardware configuration.

Fig. 3. Sampling and recording instrument.

Fig. 1. Imaging geometry and real experiment scenario in spaceborne

stationary bistatic DBF SAR configuration. (a) Imaging geometry. (b) Real
experiments scenario.

advanced technique. Although there are currently no available

spaceborne SAR systems capable of multiple receiving channels in elevation, fortunately, the spacebornestationary bistatic
configuration offers a potential chance to validate the advanced
technique.
The DBF experiment based on spacebornestationary bistatic configuration has been successfully conducted in June 2013
by the Department of Space Microwave Remote Sensing System, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. For
this experiment, TerraSAR-X is operated as the moving transmitter in the sliding spotlight mode (this mode could control the
steering angle of the antenna for longer coherent accumulation
time and better azimuth resolution), and a passive stationary
receiver with six channels is used to record the echo signal from
the illuminated scene and the direct signal from TerraSAR-X
[16]. For this raw data acquisition, the reflected signal is simultaneously recorded by five channels and synchronized by using
the one remaining channel, which is the direct TerraSAR-X
line-of-sight (LOS) signal. The imaging geometry and the real
experiment scenario are shown in Fig. 1.
Some bistatic systems and experiments have been successfully implemented to demonstrate the innovative imaging
modes and imaging approaches [16][20]. In the correspond-

ing bistatic experiments, the transmitter and receivers are

mounted on different kinds of platforms, e.g., airborne/airborne
[21], [22], spaceborne/airborne [11], [23], [24], spaceborne/
stationary [25][29], and airborne/stationary [30].
In this paper, an approach of the spacebornestationary
bistatic DBF-SAR is proposed. Section II describes the system
architecture and functions. This section links to the processing
strategy adopted for this bistatic spacebornestationary DBF
experiment and processing aspects. Section III presents the
signal model and the bistatic DBF imaging processing algorithm. Sections IV shows the experimental results and analyzes
them in detail. The final summary about the implications of
this experiment and discussions of future perspectives are in
Section V.
II. S YSTEM C ONFIGURATION
A. Hardware Configuration
As shown in Fig. 2, the designed system mainly consists
of a 12-channel data acquisition and storage instrument and
a signal detecting board. The 12-channel data acquisition and
storage instrument consists of a control host, a clocking board,
six high-speed AD sampling and storage boards, and two fiber
data transmit boards. For the aforementioned experiment, only
five channels are used to record echo signals, whereas the others
are used for synchronization of which details will be given
in Section II-B. The 725-MHz sampling frequency and the
4-TB storage boards are used to sample the data and record the
auxiliary data generated by other modules in the instrument.
Each board has two channels, i.e., CHA and CHB. CHA on
each high-speed AD sampling and storage board, as shown

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Fig. 4. Flow of pulse synchronization using direct signal.

in Fig. 3, is designed to receive the direct signals from the

illuminator on the satellite, whereas CHB is used to record the
reflected echo signals from the scene received by each wellpositioned antenna.
In Fig. 3, the green dotted line denotes the clock board. The
six sample and storage boards, marked by the red numbers
(i.e., 16), are vertically embedded in the instrument sequentially. Each board contains two channels. The upper channel
denotes CHA, and the lower one denotes CHB.
Signals fed to CHA and CHB are recorded simultaneously.
However, the constraints of the writing speed to the flash
memory are likely to deny the possibility of continuous acquisition. One of the possible ways is to generate a sampling window
via the direct signal to reduce the data quantity and ensure all
the data can be recorded. The exact opening moment of the
sampling window is precisely recorded as part of the auxiliary
data based on the timing function in the instrument.

Fig. 5. Waveguide antenna (the vertical and horizontal directions represent the
elevation and azimuth directions, respectively).

B. Synchronization Issues
For a bistatic SAR system, the synchronization technologies,
including time synchronization, phase synchronization, and
geometry synchronization, are the most important key issues,
which should be properly solved. Any deviation between the
two oscillators of two separated radars would cause a residual
modulation of the recorded azimuth signal and a drift of the
receiving window of the receiver with respect to that of the
transmitter and may prevent a proper recording of the echo
signal [9]. In this paper, the windowed data acquisition is
timely synchronized with the LOS signal, and the recorded
direct signal is employed to implement phase synchronization
in postprocessing.
Time synchronization is realized by the trigger signal given
by the detecting board through the processing of the direct
signal. The direct signal, received by the horn antenna, is
divided into seven channels. Six of them are sent to the CHA of
each board, whereas the other one is sent to the detecting board
to generate a sampling window. Using the correlations of the six
sampled direct signals, the delay and jitter can be estimated and
compensated for synchronizing the six boards. The detecting
board has a threshold manually set up, which is a little smaller
than the maximum sampling value at the beginning of the frame
and less than the amplitude of the noise. Once the value is
larger than the threshold, a rising edge signal is given as the
trigger signal of the acquisition and storage instrument. Using
the module of digital phase-locked loop (DPLL), the sampling
window is held for 120 s to ensure that the frame of the signal
is fully sampled. The rising edge of the signal given by the detecting board triggers the acquisition system and start the
recording of CHA and CHB on the six boards. The flow of the
pulse synchronization using the direct signal is shown in Fig. 4.
Bandwidth filters in the front end of the analog part will reduce
most of the noise. In the digital part, the coherent accumulation
strategy has a strong performance with respect to avoiding the

effect of spurious triggering. All these modules are realized by

an field-programmable gate array (FPGA) processing module.
Concerning the phase synchronization, it can be precisely
implemented by using the recorded direct pulse. The geometry
synchronization is achieved by precise beam steering of Ch2
with preknowledge of orbit and looking angle of the illuminator
[22], [25], [28].
C. Antenna Model
Fig. 5 shows a photo of the waveguide antenna used in our
experiment. The antenna was manufactured of aluminum alloy
for lightweight. Slotted waveguide antenna is a popular antenna
in navigation, radar, and other high-frequency systems. It is
easy to fabricate, has low loss, and radiates horizontally or vertically polarized microwave energy with low cross polarization.
The antenna is made up of five slot subarrays. In this structure, the waveguide is used as the transmission line to feed
the slots. For each subarray, four slots were cut to radiate and
receive the horizontal polarized signal. The separation between
two slots is of one-half waveguide wavelength 22.09 mm; the
separation between two subarrays is of 25 mm. The detailed
design and analysis of the antennas are numerically performed
using CST software to optimize the width and cut depth
of slots. The total size of waveguide antenna is 149.96 mm
125 mm 23.6 mm. The simulated pattern results at 9.6 GHz of
subarray and full array are shown in Fig. 6. Each subarray and
full array have a 3-dB beamwidth of 35.2 and 13.3 in elevation,
respectively. The effective aperture area of each subarray is
larger than the physical aperture area due to the cross coupling;
thus, the beamwidth of each subarray is narrower than the
theoretical value. Compared with the subarray, the gain of full
array increases from 14.6 to 20.2 dBi. The detailed parameters
are summarized in Table I.

WANG et al.: BISTATIC DEMONSTRATION OF DBF IN ELEVATION WITH TerraSAR-X AS AN ILLUMINATOR

Fig. 6. Patterns of full array and subarray at.9.6 GHz.

TABLE I
WAVEGUIDE A NTENNA S E LECTRICAL PARAMETERS

845

Fig. 7. Block diagram of the spacebornestationary bistatic DBF processor.

from the transmitter to the nth receiver channel and can be

defined as
RT ( ) + RRn ( )
= t0 + tn
c
RT ( ) + RR0 ( )
t0 =
c
RRn ( ) RR0 ( )
tn =
c
tn =

(2)
(3)
(4)

where t0 is used to express the two-way delay from the transmitter to the reference receiver channel, and c is the speed of
light. tn denotes the time delay difference between the nth
receiver to target and the reference receiver to target. RT ( ) and
RRn ( ) are the instantaneous slant ranges from the transmitter
and the nth receiver subaperture to the point target, which are
defined as

(5)
RT ( ) = r02 + 2 v 2
RRn ( ) = rn r0 + rn
III. S IGNAL M ODEL AND B ISTATIC DBF I MAGING
P ROCESSING A LGORITHM
Fig. 7 shows the block diagram of the spacebornestationary
bistatic DBF-SAR. First, each received signal is range compressed using the corresponding synchronizing signal. Then, all
the signals are combined with DBF technology for increasing
the receiving gain. Finally, azimuth compressing process is
performed for imaging.

A. Signal Model
The received signal of the nth subaperture from a point target
after demodulation is given by
gn (, t) = sl (t tn ) exp(j2f0 tn ),

n = 0, . . . , N 1
(1)
where is a complex constant related to the terrain reflectivity
and transmission loss, sl (t) represents the transmitted signal,
and f0 is the carrier frequency. tn is the two-way time delay

(6)

where and v represent the azimuth time and velocity of the

radar system. rn is the slant range of the nth receiver to target,
and r0 is the slant range of the reference receiver to target. rn
is the difference of the slant range between the nth receiver to
target and the reference receiver to target, i.e., rn r0 . Thus



((t0 ) )
rn = r02 + d2n 2r0 dn cos
2
r0 dn sin (((t0 ) ))

(7)

where dn = (n nr )d; the nr th channel is the reference receive channel; d is the interval of adjacent channels; and
and (t0 ) represent the tilt angle of the receiving antenna
and look angle of the target toward nadir, respectively. Thus,
(t0 ) = ((t0 ) ) is the off-boresight angle of the point
target. Substituting (5)(7) into (4), the time delay difference
of the nth receive subaperture can be expressed as
tn =

dn sin ((t0 ))
.
c

(8)

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Using (8) and (2) into (1), the received signal of the nth
subaperture can be reformulated as
gn (, t) = sl (t t0 tn )


2
exp j
(RT ( ) + r0 ) exp (j(n))

(9)

where (n) denotes the tomographic phase along the elevation

direction
2
(n) =
dn sin (t0 ) .
(10)

From (8)(10), it can be seen that the displaced phase center

between transmitter and receiver introduces a delay term in
range and a phase term in elevation, which are the functions
of time, imaging geometry, and subaperture position.
After range compression, the echo in the nth channel can be
expressed as
g n (, t) = pr (t t0 tn )


2
(RT ( ) + r0 ) exp [j(n)] (11)
exp j

Therefore, the echo at the instantaneous time t0 can be

received with a maximum receive gain given by

sin (N d (sin (t) sin (t0 ))/)
sin (d (sin (t) sin (t0 ))/) t=t0
sinc (N d ((t) (t0 ))/)|t=t0 N. (15)
DBF in elevation is capable of forming a narrow and timevariant beam with desired characteristics following the echo
along the ground.
C. Azimuth Compression Process
Assuming that the slant range and azimuth resolutions are
r and a and the closest slant range of the processed scene is
R0R , the position of the target (n , rm ) is (xn , ym ), given by

xn = na ,
n = 1, 2, . . . , N
(16)
ym = R0R + mr , m = 1, 2, . . . , M.
The image can be focused using traditional backprojection
algorithm. Azimuth focusing is formulated as

where pr () is the compressed pulse envelope in range.

image(n, m) =

(17)

For DBF, the time-variant weight coefficients can be formulated as



2
(12)
wn (t) = exp j dn sin (t) .

To form the receiving beam in the desired direction, the range


compressed signal g n (, t) in each channel is multiplied by the
time-variant complex weights that adjust the phase of the signal
from each subaperture; then, the data of all the receive channels
are summed up, as formulated in
N
1


wn (t) g n (, t).

(13)

n=0

From (8), it can be seen that the time delay difference

between the echoes of different channels is quite small. Thus, it
can be considered that the signal envelopes of different channels
are nearly identical and that the only difference between them
is the phase difference. Thus, the difference can be neglected.
Substituting (11) and (12) into (13), gDBF (, t) can be reformulated as
gDBF (, t) =

N
1


wn (t)pr (t t0 tn ) exp (j(n))

n=0



2
(RT ( ) + r0 )
exp j

gDBF (i, index(i , xn , ym )) c (i , xn , ym )

i=0

B. Digital Beam Formation

gDBF (, t) =

N


sin (N d (sin (t) sin (t0 ))/)

pr (t t0 )
sin (d (sin (t) sin (t0 ))/)


2
exp j
(RT ( ) + r0 ) .
(14)

where image(n, m) is the element of the image data,

gDBF (i, index(i , xn , ym )) is the element of the range combined compressed data, c (i , xn , ym ) is the compensation
phase, and i is the azimuth time of the ith range line. Thus




i , xn
index(i , xn , ym ) = round RRD
(18)
Fs /c
v, ym



i , xn
c (i , xn , ym ) = exp j2f0 RRD
c (19)
v, ym
where

 

2

i , xn
i xn
2
2
+ (ym )2 +(xn )2
= (ym ) +v
RRD
v, ym
v
(20)
where round() is a function of rounding the elements to the
nearest integers, Fs is the range sampling rate, and is the
range over sampling ratio.
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND A NALYSIS
The experiment uses TerraSAR-X in sliding spotlight mode
as transmitter. The ground receiver is fixed on the top of a hill
near the scene. The height of the hill above the illuminated
ground is 270 m, and the geometry of the radar system is shown
in Fig. 1(a). The imaging scene size is about 5 km 5 km. For
this experiment, we used six channels, where one channel is for
the direct signal from TerraSAR-X, and five channels are used
to receive the echo reflected from the illuminated scene. The
systems parameters are listed in Table II.
In this experiment, each channel received the echoes reflected by the ground, which is illuminated by TerraSAR-X.
The five channels signals were digitalized and stored, respectively. Thus, each channels signal could be processed to form a

WANG et al.: BISTATIC DEMONSTRATION OF DBF IN ELEVATION WITH TerraSAR-X AS AN ILLUMINATOR

847

TABLE II
E XPERIMENT B ISTATIC SAR PARAMETERS

Fig. 9. Zooming into the images in Fig. 8. (a) Zooming into the image marked
with red square in Fig. 8(a). (b) Zooming into the image marked with red square
in Fig. 8(b).
TABLE III
SNR OF THE I MAGES

Fig. 8. Images acquired by R1 single channel and with five-channel DBF (the
image data are quantized with the same standard). (a) Image acquired by R1
channel. (b) Image with five-channel DBF processing.

single channel bistatic SAR image. Fig. 8 shows the images of

R1 channel and the five channels with DBF processing.
From Fig. 8, it can be found that the one-channel image has a
low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). It is due to the single channels
wide beamwidth angle and low antenna gain. From the images,
a black stripe (starting from the lower left corner and going to
the top center of the image) can be found, which is caused by
the pattern of the receiving antenna.
The DBF technology could form a narrow and high gain
beam to follow the echoes reflected by the ground targets, so it
could improve the performance of the SAR system. After channel error correction and the combination of the five channels
signals to form a digital beam, the image with DBF mode is
shown in Fig. 8(b).
From the images in Fig. 8, it can be seen that the image of
one channel has much worse quality than the image of the fivechannel DBF mode. To analyze for details, we zoom into the
two images, as shown in Fig. 9.

After calculating the approximate SNR of the image of each

channel for the subarea, which is shown in Fig. 9, the relative
value of each channel is listed in Table III.
From Table III, it can be seen that the average SNR of all five
echo channels is 17.1 dB. It means that the SNR of the SAR
image with DBF processing can be improved by about 6.5 dB
compared with the average value of all five receiving channels.
The improvement of the aforementioned SNR agrees with the
theoretical value of 10 log10 (N ) 7 dB.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, a DBF experiment based on spaceborne
stationary bistatic configuration has been presented. From the
experiment, a sharper and higher gain pattern is obtained, which
improves the SNR of the final image. The experiment result
demonstrates the improvement of the SAR system with DBF
technology. For future work, the system will be extended,
and all 12 channels of our system combined with the sliding
spotlight mode of TerraSAR-X will be used to validate more

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capacities of DBF, e.g., null steering and adaptive beamforming. For future experiments, the main innovative characteristic
of multiple channels in elevation will be explored.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank their colleagues, Dr. G. Liu,
Dr. J. Tang, X. Wu, Dr. C. Hao, and R. Han for their important
contributions to this work. The authors would also like to thank
T. Balz from the State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan
University, for editing the language of this paper and the anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments and suggestions.
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Robert Wang (M07SM12) received the B.S. degree in control engineering from the University of
Henan, Kaifeng, China, in 2002 and the Dr.Eng.
degree from the Graduate University of Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, in 2007.
In 2007, he joined the Center for Sensor Systems (ZESS), University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany. He has been involved in the various joint
projects supported by ZESS and Fraunhofer-FHR,
e.g., TerraSAR-X/PAMIR hybrid bistatic SAR experiment, Phased Array Multifunctional Imaging
Radar (PAMIR)/stationary bistatic SAR experiment, PAMIR/stationary bistatic
SAR experiment with nonsynchronized oscillator, and millimeter-wave Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) SAR data processing. Since
2011, he has been a Research Fellow with the Spaceborne Microwave Remote
Sensing System Department, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, where he is currently funded by the Hundred Talents Program
of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His current research interests include
monostatic and multistatic SAR imaging and high-resolution spaceborne SAR
system and imaging model. Since 2012, he has been a Coprincipal Investigator
for Helmholtz-CAS Joint Research Group concerning Space-borne Microwave
Remote Sensing for Prevention and Forensic Analysis of Natural Hazards and
Extreme Events. He is also currently responsible for several national highresolution spaceborne imaging radar projects supported by the National HighResolution Earth Observation Major Special Program.
Dr. Wang has contributed to invited sessions at the European Conference
on Synthetic Aperture Radar (EUSAR) 2008 and 2010; the European Radar
Conference 2009; and the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) 2012, 2013, and 2014. He has been chosen as Session Chair
at EUSAR 2012 and IGARSS 2013.

WANG et al.: BISTATIC DEMONSTRATION OF DBF IN ELEVATION WITH TerraSAR-X AS AN ILLUMINATOR

Wei Wang received the B.S. degree from the National University of Defense Technology, Changsha,
China, in 2008. He is currently working toward the
Ph.D. degree in the Department of Space Microwave
Remote Sensing System, Institute of Electronics,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
He is also currently with the University of Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Beijing. His current research
interests include spaceborne SAR system design and
multichannel SAR signal processing.

849

Zhimin Zhang received the B.S. degree in electrical

engineering from the Beijing Institute of Technology,
Beijing, China, in 1992 and the M.S. degree from
the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Beijing, in 1995.
In 1995, he joined the Institute of Electronics,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he worked
on radar system design and signal processing.
His research interests include spaceborne/airborne
synthetic aperture radar technology for advanced
modes, real-time signal processing, and multifunctional radar imaging.

Yunfeng Shao received the Bachelors degree from

Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China, in
2009. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Space Microwave Remote
Sensing System, Institute of Electronics, Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
He is also currently with the University of Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Beijing. His current research
interests include bistatic SAR imaging algorithm,
stereoscopy bistatic SAR, bistatic interferometric
SAR, and TomoSAR processing.

Feng Hong received the Bachelors degree from

Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China, in 2011. He is currently
working toward the Ph.D. degree in the Department
of Space Microwave Remote Sensing System, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Beijing, China.
He is also currently with the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. His current
research interests include bistatic synchronization,
bistatic imaging algorithm, bistatic InSAR, multibaseline InSAR techniques, and MiniSAR system design.

Pei Wang received the B.S. degree in electronics

engineering from Xidian University, Xian, China,
in 2000 and the M.S. degree in communication and
information system from the Graduate University
of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China,
in 2005. He is currently working toward the Ph.D.
degree in communication and information system
at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Beijing.
In 2000, he joined the Institute of Electronics,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, where he has
been an Associate Research Fellow in the Department of Space Microwave
Remote Sensing System since 2008, working on wideband signal generation,
microwave circuit design, and synthetic aperture radar system design. He is
currently acting as the Chief Designer or a Main Participator of several national
high-resolution spaceborne/airborne imaging radar projects.

Yunkai Deng (M11) received the M.S. degree in

electrical engineering from the Beijing Institute of
Technology, Beijing, China, in 1993.
In 1993, he joined the Institute of Electronics,
Chinese Academy of Sciences (IECAS), where he
worked on antenna design, microwave circuit design,
and spaceborne/airborne SAR technology. He has
been the leader of several spaceborne/airborne SAR
programs and developed some key technologies of
spaceborne/airborne SAR. He is currently a Research
Scientist, a Member of the scientific board, and the
Director of the Department of Space Microwave Remote Sensing System with
IECAS. Since 2012, he has been a Principal Investigator for Helmholtz-CAS
Joint Research Group concerning Space-borne Microwave Remote Sensing for
Prevention and Forensic Analysis of Natural Hazards and Extreme Events.
He has authored or coauthored over 100 papers since 2002, of which over
40 are peer-reviewed and well-known journal papers His current research
interests include spaceborne/airborne SAR technology for advanced modes,
multifunctional radar imaging, and microwave circuit design.

Otmar Loffeld (M05SM06) received the

Diploma degree in electrical engineering from the
Technical University of Aachen, Aachen, Germany,
in 1982 and the Dr. Eng. degree and the Habilitation
degree in the field of digital signal processing and
estimation theory from the University of Siegen,
Siegen, Germany, in 1986 and 1989, respectively.
In 1991, he was appointed as a Professor of
digital signal processing and estimation theory at
the University of Siegen. Since then, he has been
giving lectures on general communication theory,
digital signal processing, stochastic models and estimation theory, and synthetic
aperture radar. In 1995, he became a member of the Center for Sensor
Systems (ZESS), which is a central scientific research establishment at the
University of Siegen (www.zess.uni-siegen.de ). Since 2005, he has been the
Chairman of ZESS. In 1999, he became the Principal Investigator (PI) on
Baseline Estimation for the X-Band part of the Shuttle Radar Topography
Mission, where ZESS contributed to the German Aerospace Agencys baseline
calibration algorithms. He is a PI for interferometric techniques in the German
TerraSAR-X mission, and together with Prof. Ender from FGAN, he is one
of the PIs for a bistatic spaceborne airborne experiment, where TerraSAR-X
serves as the bistatic illuminator, whereas FGANs PAMIR system mounted
on a Transall airplane is used as a bistatic receiver. In 2002, he founded the
International Postgraduate Programme Multi Sensorics, and based on that
program, he established the NRW Research School on Multi Modal Sensor
Systems for Environmental Exploration and Safety (MOSES) (www.mosesresearch.de) at the University of Siegen as an upgrade of excellence, in 2008.
He is the Speaker and Coordinator for both doctoral degree programs, hosted
by ZESS. Furthermore, he is the University of Siegens Scientific Coordinator
for Multidimensional and Imaging Systems. He has authored two textbooks
on estimation theory. His current research interests include multisensor data
fusion, Kalman filtering techniques for data fusion, optimal filtering and
process identification, SAR processing and simulation, SAR interferometry,
phase unwrapping, and baseline estimation. His recent field of interest is bistatic
SAR processing.
Prof. Loffeld is a Member of the Information Technology Society/Verband
Deutscher Elektrotechniker (ITG/VDE) and a Senior Member of the IEEE
Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. He was a recipient of the scientific
research award of North Rhine-Westphalia (Bennigsen-Foerder Preis) for his
works on applying Kalman filters to phase estimation problems such as Doppler
centroid estimation in SAR and phase and frequency demodulation.