A review of current raw SAR data compression techniques

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a sophisticated technique of all-weather radar imaging capable of producing fine detailed images from a moving platform. When such a radar is placed on-board a satellite, compression of the raw SAR signal is necessary to reduce the huge amount of collected data for the downlink to a ground station within the bandwidth constraints. This is further exasperated by new high resolution imaging radars currently in development capable of producing significantly more data. This paper presents a review of current raw SAR data compression techniques which are classified into three different categories according to the method of quantization, scalar or vector, and to the domain of compression.