Accelerated skew coordinate transformation for high resolution SAR image formation

An outline of accelerated skew coordinate system is explained for producing high quality images from the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signals and an algorithm to perform coordinate transformation for this coordinate system is proposed. In SAR image formations, the SAR signal has been transformed into the skew coordinate system in order to correct spatial distortion, known as range walk, which causes the degradation of the range resolution of the SAR images. However, this transformation destroys the space invariance of the signal parameters in the azimuth direction. The accelerated skew coordinate system can correct the range walk without destroying the space invariance. The effectiveness of the proposed coordinate transformation algorithm for the SAR image formation is verified by the experiments using simulated SAR data and actual SEASAT SAR data.