Extended Staring Spotlight - A New SAR Method of Acquisition via Concurrent Imaging

Abstract

Within the field of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), its use for acquiring detailed images on Earth's surface has always been constrained by a particular trade-off - the one between maximum obtainable area and finest possible resolution. Techniques such as ScanSAR can achieve wide swaths of land but degrading significantly image resolution, while other methods such as Staring Spotlight yield detailed images with extremely limited surface area. With the usage of a novel pulse emitting technique - Concurrent Imaging - this thesis proposed and proves the feasibility of the Extended Staring Spotlight (EST): a new acquisition mode which yields double the size of a conventional Staring Spotlight scene, while maintaining its high-level of detail throughout the image.