SAR Imaging in Frequency Scan Mode: System Optimization and Potentials for Data Volume Reduction

Frequency scanning (FScan) is an innovative acquisition mode for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems. The method is based on the frequency-dependent beam pointing capabilities of phased array antennas, artificially increased via the combined use of true time delays and phase shifters within the array antenna. By this, typical limitations of conventional SAR systems in terms of achievable swath width and azimuth resolution can be mitigated, and so a wide swath can be imaged maintaining a fine azimuthal resolution. In the first part of the article, we introduce the theoretical concept, which is necessary to evaluate the reduced echo window length (EWL) with respect to equivalent stripmap data and the implications for the transmit pulse characterization. An FScan sensor flying in a TerraSAR-X-like orbit is shown to be capable of imaging an 80-km wide swath with 1-m azimuth resolution. The resulting time–frequency properties of the recorded raw data make the traditional SAR data compression algorithms such as block-adaptive quantization (BAQ) highly inefficient in this case. Therefore, the second part of the article investigates dedicated quantization methods for efficient data volume reduction in FScan systems. Different solutions are investigated and evaluated through simulations. Various transformations of the raw data have been exploited to optimize the encoding process, including deramping, fast Fourier transform (FFT), and blockwise approaches. Compared with standard BAQ in the time domain, the suggested data compression methods significantly improve the resulting signal-to-quantization noise ratio, allowing for the reduction in the overall data volume by about 60% for the considered system scenario, while maintaining robustness in the presence of inhomogeneous scene characteristics at the cost of a modest complexity increase for its on-board implementation.