SAR digital spotlight implementation in MATLAB

Legacy synthetic aperture radar (SAR) exploitation algorithms were image-based algorithms, designed to exploit complex and/or detected SAR imagery. In order to improve the efficiency of the algorithms, image chips, or region of interest (ROI) chips, containing candidate targets were extracted. These image chips were then used directly by exploitation algorithms for the purposes of target discrimination or identification. Recent exploitation research has suggested that performance can be improved by processing the underlying phase history data instead of standard SAR imagery. Digital Spotlighting takes the phase history data of a large image and extracts the phase history data corresponding to a smaller spatial subset of the image. In a typical scenario, this spotlighted phase history data will contain much fewer samples than the original data but will still result in an alias-free image of the ROI. The Digital Spotlight algorithm can be considered the first stage in a “two-stage backprojection” image formation process. As the first stage in two-stage backprojection, Digital Spotlighting filters the original phase history data into a number of “pseudo”-phase histories that segment the scene into patches, each of which contain a reduced number of samples compared to the original data. The second stage of the imaging process consists of standard backprojection. The data rate reduction offered by Digital Spotlighting improves the computational efficiency of the overall imaging process by significantly reducing the total number of backprojection operations. This paper describes the Digital Spotlight algorithm in detail and provides an implementation in MATLAB.