Real time synthetic aperture radar (SAR) preprocessor design via three-dimensional modular filtering architecture

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems are increasingly demanding for real real-time performance. As part of an effort to develop a real-time Range-Doppler digital SAR processor to produce image maps of that scanned area immediately as raw data are collected, this paper describes the conceptual architecture design for a high-speed front-end video pre-filtering. The evolved architecture consists of richly interconnected planes of novelly-adapted Modified Transverse FIR parallel tapped delay elements. Both the range and azimuth prefilterings are performed simultaneously in a continuous input-output flow without the need to worry about corner turning caused by azimuth preprocessing on data samples that are collected in the range direction.