Efficient Evaluation of Multichannel SAR Data Recombination Filters

Kurzfassung

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a well established technique for observing the earth on a global scale. As applications become more demanding, it is desirable to overcome the limitations imposed by the SAR principle, one of which is the trade-off between the swath width and the instantaneous azimuth bandwidth, determining the resolution. Recombination of multiple channels with displaced phase centers has been proposed as a convenient way to create high resolution wideswath images. We analyze various approximations made in the channel Transfer functions and their impact on the reconstruction result using examples inspired by current imaging modes of the TerraSARX and TanDEM-X missions. In order to do so, we introduce an efficient method to assess the quality of reconstruction filters for an arbitrary number of channels without the need of full time-domain simulations.