A statistical tomographic approach to synthetic aperture radar image reconstruction

We formulate the spotlight-mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging problem as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation problem. Our statistical perspective offers an alternative to standard SAR processing techniques by incorporating prior knowledge about either the data quality or the underlying reflectivity function. In our formulation we consider exploiting the similarity between computer assisted tomography (CAT) and spotlight-mode SAR, which was first exposed by Munson et al. (1983). We present the effectiveness of the proposed approach by imagery formed from simulated spotlight-mode SAR data.