Wide-area, persistent SAR imaging: Algorithm tradeoffs

This paper presented a concise review of the SAR image formation options amenable to large scene sizes and staring applications. The need for nonlinear flight trajectories limits our algorithmic options to DBS, PFA, and CBP, with digital spotlighting used by each to mitigate difficulties with large scene sizes. An analysis of the computational cost of each algorithm was developed, and they were compared for a notional staring SAR application with and without data reuse. The CBP algorithm was consistently the most computationally expensive, at times by an order of magnitude or more, while PFA with and without corrections was frequently the most efficient. However, the CBP algorithm is more amenable to implementation on some computational platforms, such as GPUs and parallel architectures. In limited applications of coarse resolution, the DBS was the most effective.