Abstract: Imaging algorithm is crucial to the performance of the synthetic aperture radar (SAR).Existing testing methodnot only needs to use real equipment,radar data and testing environment,but also lacks a reasonable evaluation for the imaging result,which greatly affect the efficiency and effectiveness of the software testing.To solve these problems,this paper presented a novel testing method based on simulation for the validation of SAR imaging algorithms.Firstly,the echo data are generated independently via improved concentric circle method,eliminating the real echo data constraint.Then,the correctness and feasibility of imaging algorithms are evaluated scientifically by quantitative indicators combined with point target imaging as well as distributed scene target imaging.The proposed method greatly improves the effectiveness of the testing work.Finally,the correctness and the effectiveness of the proposed method were verified by simulation experiments.

Key words: Simulation, Synthetic aperture radar(SAR), Validation of imaging algorithm