SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR IMAGE FORMATON PROCESS: APPLICATION TO A REGION OF NORTH ALGERIA

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar imaging provides high resolution images of large areas. The intensities of pixels in a SAR image are based on the spatial orientation, roughness, and dielectric constant of the surface imaged. SAR is an active sensor, transmitting its own energy, and then measuring the return scattered by the earth’s surface back to the satellite’s antenna. SAR processing is the transformation of raw SAR signal data into a spatial image. In this communication, we present a contribution concerning implementation of a SAR image formation with the IDL language. This process is performed in a frequency domain correlation of the received signal including range compression, range migration, and azimuth compression. The output is the final step in which the data is transposed back into its original format and written to an output file. The data used are raw SAR image of scene of north Algeria of size 5616*28000 pixels of the 16 of February 1996. Evaluation of the method studied here is made on a Region of Reghaia lake ( near of Algiers city) of 2048*5616 pixels. 1.