A Three Dimensional SAR Simulator

We outline the general structure of IAGO, the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Simulator developed at IRECE-CNR. IAGO is a SAR Simulator of extended three dimensional terrain scene. Input to the simulator are terrain geometrical and physical parameters, as well as SAR system parameters. The reflectivity map of the scene is estimated under physical optics approximation; a great care has been taken to correctly implement layover and shadowing which may occour in a non-flat scene. An efficient and memory saving algorithm is implemented to get the simulated data (holographic signal). This is accomplished by a two-dimensional FFT code coupled with asymptotic evaluation of the system transfer function. Finally, some meaningful examples are referred to.