Analytic models and postprocessing techniques for UWB SAR

Abstract

The latest generation of fully polarimetric, ultra wideband (UWB), wide angle, low frequency, foliage and ground-penetrating synthetic aperture radars (SARs) record huge amounts of data that must be processed to focus high quality images. At the same time only a few small subimages contain important information. We investigate the relationship between the focused image and the reflectivity profile and show that a linear shift-invariant model adequately represents the overall process when the focusing is done with a backprojection algorithm over a constant integration angle. The derived signal model can be used to replace many computationally expensive processing techniques, previously performed on the raw data, with equivalent postprocessing algorithms which can be applied selectively to subimages.