FAST ALGORITHM FOR A NEAR-FIELD SYNTHETIC-APERTURE RADAR PROCESSOR

A radar image can be formed by coherently integrating the backscattere d fields over the measured frequency band and cross-range scan. This c oherent integration can be seen as a convolution of the measured data and a focusing function, which only depends on the geometry of the mea surement. Thus, by applying fast Fourier transform (FFT) techniques an d computing a product in the Fourier domain one can efficiently recons truct the target image. On the other hand, in the particular case of i ndoor synthetic aperture radar (SAR) measurements with the same geomet ry, the focusing operator must be computed just once and may be reused when processing the different datasets, reducing drastically the comp uting time.