High resolution airborne FM-CW SAR: digital signal processing aspects

There is a growing interest in miniaturized cost-effective, high resolution imaging radar. Existing imaging systems are generally too heavy or too expensive. Frequency modulated continuous wave (FM-CW) radars are usually more compact and less expensive and combining this technology with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) methods leads to an interesting sensor for small-scale applications. The radar delivers signal in frequency domain rather than in the time one so special processing algorithm, which takes the typical characteristics of FM-CW radar signal into account, has to be used. Frequency shift information of the FM-CW signal is being used to obtain both range and azimuth resolution. Although these shift occur at different scales, there may be a mix up: this has been investigated.