Signum coded synthetic aperture radar: The effect of oversampling on image quality

Processing of one bit coded synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signals is considered. One bit coding amounts to retaining only the information about the sign of the signals (signum coding or SC). Theory shows that the image obtained is proportional to that obtained by conventionally quantized data. Possible discrepancies depends on the frequency overlapping among the higher order harmonics generated by the SC operation. To improve the image quality, a sampling rate increase with respect to one consistent with the original signal bandwidth has to be used. Some image quality parameters are also evaluated on actual SAR images