Advanced Digital Beamforming Concepts for High Performance Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Imaging

This paper reviews advanced multi-channel SAR system concepts for the imaging of wide swaths with high resolution. Several novel system architectures employing both direct radiating arrays and reflector antennas fed by a digitial array are introduced and compared to each other with regard to their imaging performance. In addition, innovative operational SAR imaging modes are proposed which enable the mapping of ultra-wide swaths with high azimuth resolution. The new techniques and technologies introduced in this paper have the potential to enhance the imaging performance of future SAR systems by one order of magnitude if compared to state of the art SAR sensors like TerraSAR-X, ALOS, Radarsat-2 or Sentinel-1.

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