Journal Article

A Review of Synthetic-Aperture Radar Image Formation Algorithms and Implementations: A Computational Perspective

Neto, Horácio, Monteiro, José, Cruz, Helena, Duarte, Rui Policarpo, Véstias, Mário

2022

Overview

Designing synthetic-aperture radar image formation systems can be challenging due to the numerous options of algorithms and devices that can be used. There are many SAR image formation algorithms, such as backprojection, matched-filter, polar format, Range–Doppler and chirp scaling algorithms. Each algorithm presents its own advantages and disadvantages considering efficiency and image quality; thus, we aim to introduce some of the most common SAR image formation algorithms and compare them based on these two aspects. Depending on the requisites of each individual system and implementation, there are many device options to choose from, for instance, FPGAs, GPUs, CPUs, many-core CPUs, and microcontrollers. We present a review of the state of the art of SAR imaging systems implementations. We also compare such implementations in terms of power consumption, execution time, and image quality for the different algorithms used.

• Publisher: MDPI AG
• Subject: Aircraft / Algorithms / Antennas / Central processing units / Computer applications / CPUs / energy use and consumption / Field programmable gate arrays / FPGA implementations / GPU implementations / Ice / Image quality / many-core implementations / Microcontrollers / Power consumption / Radar / Radar imaging / Remote sensing / SAR algorithms / SAR systems / Satellites / Signal processing / State-of-the-art reviews / Synthetic aperture radar / Unmanned aerial vehicles / Vegetation