Raw data compression for synthetic aperture radar
Yves Le Roy, Jean-Guy Planès, F. Cazaban · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1995
This paper is intended to compare compression algorithms suitable for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) raw data. BAQ, BFPQ and BFPQ combined with vector quantization have been applied to simulated and actual ERS-1 raw data with output data rates of 2 and 3 bits per sample. The simulated raw data are generated from a terrain scenario (point target and uniform areas of sigma 0) scanned by a SAR simulator set to ERS-1 parameters. The measurements performed on raw data consist of histograms, signal to digital noise ratios and quadratic phase errors. The effects of compression on the resulting SAR processed images are assessed by measuring the impulse response parameters, the radiometric degradation and by displaying difference images. Eventually, the performances reached on simulated and actual data are discussed and compared.