A concept compute system for onboard SAR image formationprocessing
Jamin Naghmouchi, Rolf Scheiber · 2018
At present there is a considerable amount of Synthetic Aperture Radar missions under study which either require onboard payload data processing for reducing the SAR data load for downlink and/or which could provide much better quality of service in terms of promptness by implementing the SAR image formation processing onboard and thus allowing the downlink of ready to use data products at reduced data size compared to SAR raw data. This paper presents a concept compute system based on commercially available processors and optimized software libraries, which supports payload data processing in blocks of 16k by 16k complex samples (2 GByte). The system is benchmarked for the SAR image formation processing application using a wavenumber domain algorithm applied to simulated Sentinel-1 raw data in stripmap mode. For this case it is proven that image formation is possible in real-time.