Synthetic-Aperture Radar Observation Data Amount Compression Technique Using Orthogonal Binary Sequences

Modern satellite and aircraft synthetic-aperture radars (SAR) require high pulse rate frequency as well as high data sample rate to obtain better range and azimuth resolution images without distortion. These properties lead to significant data streams transferring from a data sampling device to a storage device or to a remote ground station. Thus, two main characteristics have to be considered: the data storage device volume and the data write/transfer rate. The capacity of the storage devices develops rapidly, although it may still be a problem for space devices due to the lack of radiation hardened ICs. However, the data transfer rate is also a problem and it is restrained by some physical limitations. The paper proposes an approach to compress the amount of data by combining responses from several probing pulses with orthogonal binary sequences. Presented simulation results and compressed radar images show the solid application potential of the proposed technique.