Implementation of a fast time-domain processor for FMCW synthetic aperture radar data

For the purpose of getting sensitive information relevant to civil or military security, high-resolution airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides the possibility to organize missions at short notice regardless of the daylight and of the weather conditions. The use of compact millimeter-wave FMCW SAR systems allows reaching these goals more safely and at lower cost using unmanned lightweight platforms. As a counterpart these platforms are relatively unstable, making the data-processing more difficult. In order to reach optimum focusing quality also in unfavorable flight conditions or for highly non-linear tracks we developed a fast Time-Domain Processor that relies on parallelization using the GPU resources. A production areal processing rate as high as 6 km(2)/h using 20 cm ground pixel spacing on a single PC station was achieved. The processing quality and efficiency is demonstrated using real data from the MIRANDA35 Ka-band SAR system.