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Abstract
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a remote sensing technique that allows not only to illuminate a scene at any moment independently on weather conditions, but also to improve azimuth resolution taking advantage of the sensor motion to simulate a larger antenna. The creation of a synthetic antenna for the imaging operation of the system allows the acquisition of great amounts of raw data. Processing of such amounts of data demands the use of good computational tools. In addition to be fast and accurate, algorithms for SAR data processing, should be user friendly, easy to use, and available at low cost.
In this report, we present SARCSPE (Synthetic Aperture Radar Computational Signal Processing Environment), an environment that includes many operations necessary for developing and using algorithms for processing SAR data. Since the environment tools are based on the use of fast transformations, the algorithms are fast. Special care is put on the simulation of image formation algorithms.
Efficient algorithms have been programmed thanks to the use of algebraic tools such as the Kronecker Products and thanks to the fact that operations such as the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and cyclic convolution have been represented in the form of matrix-vector operations rather than a sequence of loops.
