A new quantization method for SAR signals

We propose a new quantization method for received synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signals and a quantizer design technique. This method divides the received signal into bandlimited signals by using orthogonal wavelet transforms and quantizes each bandlimited signal by a different quantizer. Employing this method, not only is there a reduction in the computational load for image reconstruction by the SAR fast approximate reconstruction proposed previously by the authors, but the accuracy of the reconstructed image is substantially improved when there are few quantization bits of the received signal, particularly in image reconstruction by the correlation method. In this paper, we design a quantizer for bandlimited signals and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by computer simulations of image reconstruction. (C) 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.