An interferometric quick-look processor

A technique to get medium resolution (40/spl times/40 m, on the ground), strip-map synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferograms and coherence maps close to real-time by means of common UNIX workstations or PCs is presented. The requested efficiency is achieved by the following: 1) exploiting the spectral shift principle to reduce the data rate at the cost of some signal loss; 2) exploiting polyphase filters and integer implementation to get azimuth looks; 3) implementing a fast and robust estimator of coregistering parameters based both on amplitude cross correlation and of looks' phase mismatch estimate.