Digital Signal Processing 101

CHAPTER 18Synthetic Array Radar

Synthetic Array Radar, or SAR, is normally used to map ground features and terrain. It is also known in the literature as Synthetic Aperture Radar. Both names make sense, though we use Synthetic Array Radar here. This type of radar is used for a wide variety of military and commercial applications. It can be made to map almost arbitrarily fine resolution ground features or used to more coarsely map larger areas with comparative effort.

This process produces maps, which are often color coded. The color does not represent the actual color of the landscape but is used to indicate the strength of return signals for each resolvable location on the ground. Alternately, the images can be grayscale, with light regions ...