SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR (SAR) DATA PROCESSING

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a remote-sensing tool that can generate high-resolution images of the earth’s surface under all weather conditions and at all times. These images are maps of the specific radar cross-section of the earth’s surface. The first spaceborne SAR on board the satellite. Seasat, proved to be a tremendous success despite its unfortunately short life-span of 31/3 months. Presently, satellites such as the European Remote-Sensing Satellites (ERS-1 and ERS-2). Japanese Earth Resources Satellite (JERS-1) and the Canadia RADARSAT are actively orbiting the earth and transmitting SAR data to ground receiving stations. SAR is able to provide valuable information on the terrain for application such as land use classification and environmental monitoring even for regions which are almost constantly covered by clouds. However, the voluminous data that are collected by the sensors on board the satellites must first be accurately and efficiently processed before they can be used. The objective of this thesis is to develop algorithms for precision processing of spaceborne SAR data. A careful review of well-known existing SAR processing algorithms(range-Doppler and chirp-scaling) leads to the development of a new efficient algorithm, differential range correction (DRC) algorithm. The motivation is to process SAR data using its natural two-dimensional, albeit range-varying point target response function.