Hardware acceleration of the motion compensation algorithms in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) platforms

摘要

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) techniques employ radar waves to generate high-resolution images in all illumination/weather conditions. The onboard implementation of the image reconstruction algorithms allows for the transmission of real-time video feeds, rather than raw radar data, from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), saving significant communication bandwidth. This in turn saves power, enables longer missions, and allows the transmission of more useful information to the ground. For this application, we created a hardware architecture for a portable implementation of the motion compensation algorithms, which are more computationally intensive than the SAR reconstruction itself, and without which the quality of the SAR images is severely degraded, rendering them unusable.