A digital system to produce imagery from SAR data

Abstract

This paper describes a digital processing algorithm and its associated system design for producing images from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The proposed system uses the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) approach to perform the two-dimensional correlation process. The range migration problem, which is often a major obstacle to efficient processing, can be alleviated by approximating the locus of echoes from a point target by several linear segments. SAR data corresponding to each segment is correlated separately, and the results are coherently summed to produce full-resolution images. This processing approach exhibits greatly improved computation efficiency relative to conventional digital processing methods.