Owing to the ability of accurate angle estimation, monopulse technique can be applied in airborne or missile-borne radar forward-looking imaging procedure. However due to the limited spatial domain DOF (degree of freedom), when more than one target appears in beam simultaneously, monopulse technique will fail to estimate angle of targets accurately. To deal with this problem, the multi-channel radar forward-looking imaging algorithm based on super resolution, which can further improve the azimuth resolution as compared to monopulse imaging algorithm, is investigated. By introducing MUSIC (multiple signal classification) algorithm into multi-channel radar forward-looking imaging procedure, multi-channel forward-looking imaging algorithm is proposed, with estimation of source number completed by GDE (Gerschrion disk estimator) algorithm. The entire signal processing steps are provided in detail in this paper. At last, the performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by simulation results, with the spatial domain DOF increased, accuracy of target angle estimation is improved and the performance of azimuth resolution of forward-looking area image is promoted.
