Time and space integrating acousto-optic SAR image-formation processor

The time-and-space integrating (TSI) acousto-optic approach for real-time synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging was developed for applications with severe power and size constraints. Compactness and low power consumption are achieved by performing the computationally intensive operations in the analog optical domain. The required SAR imaging filters are updated rapidly through electronic programmability and downloaded to the optical system via acousto-optic Bragg cells. Under the DARPA TOPS (Transition of Optical Processing into Systems) Program, a rugged prototype of this concept is being developed for integration with high performance SAR platforms. In this paper the TSI approach is reviewed and simulation results are presented which demonstrate the concept's ability to efficiently focus high resolution SAR phase history data across a large target area, while compensating for large amounts of range migration.