Computational synthetic aperture radar (cSAR): a flexible signal simulator for multichannel SAR systems

This paper presents an overview of the theory and capabilities of computational synthetic aperture radar (cSAR), a time-domain SAR system simulator. cSAR offers a robust design of the SAR system and the scene to be imaged, including arbitrary trajectories for both the SAR platform and moving targets, flexible antenna configuration and characterization, and user-specified probability density functions and correlation characteristics of the scene's underlying scatterers. A number of system, clutter, and target scenarios are simulated with cSAR and presented in this paper. In particular, two airborne SAR systems are simulated, namely the Convair-580 system and the Intermap Technologies Inc. STAR-3i, and the simulated system characteristics are demonstrated to be consistent with theory. A wide variety of clutter characteristics are simulated and shown to be consistent with the K distribution model. Additionally, several targets moving at different speeds and directions in a range of clutter fields are simulated, and the results show that the characteristics of the simulated moving targets are consistent with real data.