Fast Barycentric-Based Back Projection Algorithm for SAR Imaging

Abstract

The paper presents a novel fast barycentric-based back projection (BP) algorithm for radar imaging using the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technique. The innovation in the proposed method is in the determination of the reverse virtual synthetic aperture beam for each point of the observed radar scene and in classifying which portion of raw radar data must be considered to complete imaging processing. This approach allows the classical well-known BP algorithm to be significantly accelerated, which is one of the most computationally demanding methods in SAR imaging. The proposed barycentric-based BP method gives the opportunity to control the resolution of the processed image by changing the width of the calculated beam. Moreover, the described solution is still highly parallelizable such as the classical BP algorithm. The solution can be adapted to a real-time SAR system with modern high-end computational units such as graphical processor units (GPUs) that support parallel computing. In this paper, the BP algorithm is clearly described with its barycentric-based modification. The proposed method is compared with a classical BP algorithm based on the measurement of simulated and real data.