Spatial coherence considerations for the phase center approximation

Synthetic aperture sonar image reconstruction relies on the coherence of overlapping phase centers to provide accurate micronavigation for a sensed scene. It is shown that phase centers lose coherence for near-range scattering from large SAS arrays due to the fundamentally bistatic nature of these sensors. This effect is modeled using the van Cittert-Zernike theorem and a point-based sonar scattering model. Reduction of the window length used in the delay estimation process can partially mitigate the loss of coherence at the expense of increased variance in the resulting delay estimates.