A FREQUENCY DOMAIN RAW SIGNAL SIMULATOR FOR SAR

A raw signal simulator for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a useful tool for the design and implementation of SAR system. Also, in order to analyze and verify the developed SAR processor, the raw signal simulator is required. Moreover, there is the need for a test system to help designing new SAR sensors and mission of SAR system. The derived parameters of the SAR simulator also help to generate accurate SAR processing algorithms. Although the ultimate purpose of this research is to presents a general purpose SAR simulator, this paper presents a SAR simulator in frequency domain at the first step. The proposed simulator generates the raw signal by changing various simulation parameters such as antenna parameters, modulation parameters, and sampling parameters. It also uses the statistics from an actual SAR image to imitate actual physical scattering. This paper introduces the procedures and parameters of the simulator, and presents the simulation results. Experiments have been conducted by comparing the simulated raw data with original raw SAR image. In addition, the simulated raw data have been verified through commercial SAR processing software.