Acoustooptic processor for real-time synthetic aperture radar Image formation

Abstract

A real-time optical processor has been built to investigate the applicability of optical processing to synthetic aperture radar image formation. By taking advantage of the high processing speed and large time-bandwidth product of acoustooptic devices (AODs) combined with the multichannel correlation capability of CCD detectors used in the time delay and integrate (TDI) mode, a small real-time SAR processor can be built. The required 2-D matched filtering operation is first performed in range using the AOD and then the azimuthal matched filtering is performed using either a fixed or alterable mask in a TDI correlator configuration.1 A processor has been built to investigate the effect of system architecture on image quality and system complexity. The system is described and experimentally obtained PSF and image data are shown. The potential for system miniaturization and ruggedization is also discussed.