A modified algorithm for SAR parallel imaging

Synthetic aperture radar can provide two dimension images by converting the acquired echoed SAR signal to targets coordinate and reflectivity. With the advancement of sophisticated SAR signal processing, more and more SAR imaging methods have been proposed for synthetic aperture radar which works at near field and the Fresnel approximation is not appropriate. Time domain correlation is a kind of digital reconstruction method based on processing the synthetic aperture radar data in the two-dimensional frequency domain via Fourier transform. It reconstructs SAR image via simply correlation without any need for approximation or interpolation. But its high computational cost for correlation makes it unsuitable for real time imaging. In order to reduce the computational burden a modified algorithm about time domain correlation was given in this paper. It also can take full advantage of parallel computations of the imaging processor. Its practical implementation was proposed and the preliminary simulation results were presented. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is a computationally efficient way of implementing the reconstruction in real time SAR image processing.