Hardware Accelerated Design of a Dual-Mode Refocusing Algorithm for SAR Imaging Systems.

Area of Science:

• Remote Sensing
• Signal Processing
• Computer Engineering

Background:

• Satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is increasingly used for moving target imaging.
• Improving the imaging quality of SAR systems remains a key research focus.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a dual-mode refocusing algorithm for high-quality and fast SAR imaging.
• To optimize target speed estimation and implement data enhancement and quantization for SAR image refocusing.

Main Methods:

• A dual-mode refocusing algorithm was developed and optimized for target speed estimation.
• Data enhancement and quantization design were implemented for SAR image refocusing.
• The algorithm was implemented on a Xilinx XC5VFX130T FPGA, utilizing serial-parallel conversion and pipeline design.

Main Results:

• The system achieved a processing speed of two frames per second for real SAR image slice data.
• The implementation utilized 69633 LUTs, 255 RAMs, and 296 DSPs on the FPGA.
• Simulations were performed using dual-mode image data with slice sizes of 512x512 (slice mode) and 256x256 (scan mode).

Conclusions:

• The developed dual-mode refocusing algorithm enables high-quality and fast SAR imaging of moving targets.
• The FPGA implementation demonstrates efficient resource utilization and achieves significant processing speeds.
• This work contributes to advancements in SAR imaging technology for moving object detection.