Analysis of Sentinel-1A FDBAQ after commissioning phase

This paper concerns the performance of the Flexible Dynamic Block Adaptive Quantizer (FDBAQ), the on-board data compression scheme used by Sentinel-1A (S-1), the C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system for Earth Observation launched on 3rd April 2014. FDBAQ has been designed to deal with the high instrument data rate due to the high spatial resolution and large swath width. S-1 SAR is able to acquire long data take, corresponding to large volumes of data stored on-board. Since FD-BAQ has been implemented for the first time on S-1, the capabilities of such a compression scheme have not been tested on real data before. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of the analysis of real acquisitions acquired after the end of the Commissioning Phase, so in its full efficiency. FDBAQ is compared with the traditional Block Adaptive Quantizer (BAQ) compression scheme in terms of quantization noise level, average bit rate and signal to noise ratio.

[1]  Davide D'Aria,et al.  Sentinel-1 Flexible Dynamic Block Adaptive Quantizer , 2010 .

[2]  Malcolm Davidson,et al.  GMES Sentinel-1 mission , 2012 .

[3]  Ciro Cafforio,et al.  Optimal block quantization for SAR data , 2010, 2010 IEEE Radar Conference.

[4]  Andrea Pietropaolo,et al.  GMES Sentinel-1: Mission and satellite system overview , 2012 .

[5]  Ron Kwok,et al.  Block adaptive quantization of Magellan SAR data , 1989 .

[6]  Theo Algra,et al.  Data compression for operational SAR missions using entropy-constrained block adaptive quantisation , 2002, IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[7]  Allen Gersho,et al.  Principles of quantization , 1978 .

[8]  Paul Snoeij,et al.  Analysis of Sentinel-1 mission capabilities , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[9]  Pedro Gonçalves,et al.  Generation of ENVISAT ASAR Mosaics accessible on-line , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[10]  Ciro Cafforio,et al.  Flexible Dynamic Block Adaptive Quantization for Sentinel-1 SAR Missions , 2010, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.