Development of Quicklook Processor for Circularly Polarized Synthetic Aperture Radar onboard GAIA-II Microsatellite

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar sensor produce large amount of raw data and requires high amount of computing resources to process the data into full resolution image. Although most SAR application requires high-resolution image, there are cases where low-resolution is also important, for example when browsing from large collection of raw data to find the area of interest. A quick-look SAR processor for L-band Circularly Polarized Synthetic Aperture radar sensor onboard GAIA-II microsatellite is developed to produce low-resolution images and enable rapid preview of CP-SAR images on commodity of the shelf computer system. The algorithm is based on modified
Range-Doppler processing with sub-aperture data processing. The result is validated using actual raw data from JERS SAR that has similar characteristics with GAIA-II CP SAR sensor.