Modeling and sensitivity analysis of navigation parameter errors for airborne synthetic aperture radar stereo geolocation

For the high-resolution airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) stereo geolocation application, the final geolocation accuracy is influenced by various error parameter sources. In this paper, an airborne SAR stereo geolocation parameter error model, involving the parameter errors derived from the navigation system on the flight platform, has been put forward. Moreover, a kind of near-direct method for modeling and sensitivity analysis of navigation parameter errors is also given. This method directly uses the ground reference to calculate the covariance matrix relationship between the parameter errors and the eventual geolocation errors for ground target points. In addition, utilizing true flight track parameters’ errors, this paper gave a verification of the method and a corresponding sensitivity analysis for airborne SAR stereo geolocation model and proved its efficiency.