Azimuth-Switched Quantization for SAR Systems and Performance Analysis on TanDEM-X Data

In synthetic aperture radar (SAR) applications, raw data quantization represents an aspect of primary importance, since the number of bits employed for radar signal digitization on one hand affects the on-board memory consumption and the data volume to be transmitted to the ground, but also on the other hand affects the quality of the SAR images. In this letter, we introduce a novel azimuth-switched quantization technique, which allows the implementation of non-integer quantization rates in a new, efficient way. This grants higher flexibility in terms of performance design and resource allocation, without increasing the complexity and the computational load of the quantization scheme. The presented results were obtained in the frame of the TanDEM-X mission.