OPTRONIC HIGH-RESOLUTION SAR PROCESSING WITH THE CAPABILITY OF FULL-RESOLUTION IMAGING

The improvement of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) resolution brings a broader applications but poses a great burden for SAR data processor. Real-time processing becomes a difficulty. Optronic technology has been developed for SAR real-time processing due to its ultrafast processing speed. A novel real-time optronic high-resolution SAR processor is proposed in this paper. It has the capability of full-resolution imaging. Restricted with the data scale of spatial light modulators (SLMs), SAR raw data cannot be all encoded onto the light beams at a time. To solve this, subaperture architecture is introduced in our system scheme. SAR data is optically processed in parallel by multiple optical subaperture processing modules and synthesized into a full-resolution SAR image. The module is implemented by multiple SLMs and lenses, which is innovatively proposed in this paper. The proposed system is applicable to large-scale SAR data processing, and the data scale is easy to extend with implementation of adding identical optical subaperture processing modules. Airborne SAR real data is used in the experiment, and a high-resolution image is also given. The PSLR of the focus results with and without subaperture partition are analyzed, which validates the satisfying image quality of the proposed algorithm.