RAW SAR DATA-COMPRESSION USING VECTOR QUANTIZATION

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a day/night and all-weather active i maging system, which can record images with a fine spatial resolution independent of the sensor altitude. All these characteristics make the SAR a valuable instrument for Earth observation. However, computer sy stem technology does not currently enable spaceborne processing and st orage of the great amount of data required to synthesize an image. Vec tor quantization is a lossy numerical method for signal compression. T his method can be implemented aboard remote systems and is designed to reduce the bit stream of transmission over a noiseless channel. Analy sis and prospects for this compression algorithm, applied on raw SAR d ata, are presented.