Radar imaging

Abstract

Because of their ability to operate without regard to day, night or weather conditions, radar systems are ubiquitous in remote sensing operations and are used in a wide variety of commercial and military applications. High resolution radar imaging, however, is a remote sensing subcategory that requires raw radar data to be collected over an artificially extended aperture that is much larger than the radar receiving antenna and processed to create a reflectivity image of a scene (typically by backprojection methods). These synthetic aperture radar imaging (SAR) methods have been in use for over 50 years and, while the methodology for simple radar imaging is quite mature, there are still many active research programs seeking to extend the quality of—and information obtained from—SAR images.