An advanced airborne real-time SAR processing system

An advanced airborne real-time SAR processing system has been developed. Some sets of the system are now in operation at several organizations. By implementing all necessary processing functions by software, such as yaw-steering compensation and multi-resolution mode with pre-summing, we are able to eliminate several important hardware components such as mechanical yaw steering system and data reduction filters. This fully digitized and software oriented SAR architecture gives significant flexibility to the system, without compromising its performance. Besides above-mentioned advantages, the system has some new improvements, such as precise target positioning and compatibility of seamless imaging and software yaw steering, which is usually contradictory.