Systolic Algorithms for Imaging from Space

Abstract : The goal of the Strategic Defense Initiative is to develop technologies that can be used to defend against the threat of nuclear ballistic missiles. Primary components of a strategic defense system would be a high resolution sensing or imaging system for surveillance, acquisition, tracking, and overall monitoring of targets, and a weapons system possible utilizing directed energy or kinetic energy technologies for destroying targets. The research in this project was aimed at developing algorithms and VLSI architectures for high resolution imaging from space. The problems studied were from two major, related categories: algorithm definition and development, and VLSI implementation of signal and image processing algorithms. In the first category, the imaging problems studied were from synthetic aperture radar, high of the work was to find high-performance algorithms suitable for high-speed implementation on multi processor arrays. The second aspect of our work focussed on VLSI implementation of signal processors, the analysis of finite register length effects, and the development of short wordlength, low noise structures for signal and image processing. (KR)