REAL-TIME PROCESSOR FOR THE DANISH AIRBORNE SAR

The design of the Danish high resolution SAR was started in 1986, and the initial test flights took place in November and December 1989. An airborne real-time processor is currently under development, and a first reduced version is expected to be operational in mid-1992. The real-time processor is primarily intended to assist the operator in using the SAR system, but since the processor has been designed to produce high quality imagery, it is expected to render offline processing superfluous in many cases. The range-Doppler algorithm is adopted and supplemented with an extensive motion compensation taking into account the special conditions associated with real time strip mapping of large scenes. From an architectural point of view the processor is a pipeline of approximately 20 elements interconnected by a dedicated data path and a control bus. Only three different types of elements are involved: a programmable signal processing element, a multipurpose memory element and a multipurpose interface element. Two commercially available control boards and a display system support the pipeline.