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.