• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.530-533
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• 2005

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.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.187-196
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• 2017

The size of raw data has dramatically increased due to the recent trend of Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) development plans for high resolution and high definition image acquisition. The large raw data has an impact on satellite operability due to the limitations of storage and transmission capacity. To improve the SAR operability, the SAR raw data shall be compressed before transmission to the ground station. The Block Adaptive Quantization (BAQ) algorithm is one of the data compression algorithm and has been used for a long time in the spaceborne SAR system. In this paper, an optimization method of BAQ threshold table is introduced using real SAR raw data to prevent the degradation of signal quality caused by data compression. In this manner, a new variation estimation strategy and a new threshold method for block type decision are introduced.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2000.11a
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• pp.501-504
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• 2000

The classical image reconstruction for stripmap SAR is the range-Doppler imaging. However, when the spotlight SAR system was envisioned, range-Bowler imaging fumed out to fail rapidly in this SAR imaging modality. What is referred to as polar format processing, which is based on the plane wave approximation, was introduced for imaging from spotlight SAR data. This paper has been studied for the raw data processing schemes in the spotlight-mode synthetic aperture radar. we apply the wavefront reconstruction scheme that does not utilize the approximation in spotlight-mode SAR imaging modelity, and compare the performance of target imaging with the polar format inversion scheme.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.163-171
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• 2005

I have developed a processor for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) raw data compression using range-doppler algorithm for educational purpose. The program realized a generic SAR focusing algorithm so that it can deal with any SAR system if the specification is known. It can run efficiently on a low-cost computer by selecting minimum size out of a whole dataset, and can produce intermediate images during the process. Especially, the program is designed for educational purpose in such a way that Doppler centroid and azimuth ambiguity can be determined graphically by the user. By distributing the source code and the algorithm to public, I intend to maximize the educational effect on understanding and utilizing SAR data. This paper introduces the principle of SAR focusing algorithm embedded on the eSAR processor and shows an example of data processing using ERS-1 raw data.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.130-138
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• 2003

The classical image reconstruction for stripmap-mode Synthetic Aperture Radar is the Range-Doppler algorithm. When the spotlight-mode SAR system was envisioned, Range-Doppler algorithm turned out to fail rapidly in this SAR imaging modality. Thus, what is referred to as Polar format algorithm, which is based on the Plane wave approximation, was introduced for imaging from spotlight-mode SAR raw- data. In this paper, we have studied for the raw data processing schemes in the spotlight-mode Synthetic Aperture Radar. We apply the Wavefront Reconstruction scheme that does not utilize the approximation in spotlight-mode SAR imaging modelity, and compare the performance of target imaging with the Polar format inversion scheme.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.590-593
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• 2004

Extraction of ocean surface current velocity offers important physical oceanographic parameters especially on understanding ocean environment. Although Remote Sensing techniques were highly developed, the investigation of ocean surface current using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is not an easy task. This paper presents the results of ocean surface current observation using Doppler Centroid of ERS-1 SAR data obtained off the coast of Korea peninsula. We employed the concept, in which Doppler frequency shift and the ocean surface current are closely related, to evaluate ocean surface current. Moving targets cause Doppler frequency shift of the back scattered radar waves of SAR, thus the line-of-sight velocity component of the scatters can be evaluated. The Doppler frequency shift can be measured by estimating the difference between Doppler Centroid of raw SAR data and reference Doppler Centroid. Theoretically, the Doppler Centroid is zero; however, squinted antenna which is affected by several physical factors causes Doppler Centroid to be nonzero. The reference Doppler Centroid can be obtained from measurements of sensor trajectory, attitude and Earth model. The estimated Doppler Centroid was compensated by considering the accurate attitude estimation of ERS-1 SAR. We could verify the correspondence between the estimated ocean surface current and observed in-situ data in the error bound.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.729-732
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• 2005

This paper describes a time-spatial domain model for simulating raw data acquisition of space-borne SAR system. The position, velocity and attitude information of the platform at a certain time instance is used for deriving sensor-target model. Ground target is modelled by a set of point scatters with reflectivity and two-dimensional ground coordinates. The signal received by SAR is calculated for each slow and fast time instance by integrating the reflectivity and phase values from all target point scatters. Different from frequency domain simulation algorithms, the proposed time domain algorithm can provide fully physical modelling of SAR raw data simulation without any assumptions or approximations.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.239-245
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• 2016

Deramping technique has been widely used to acquire high resolution SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) images for the advantage of the data size and the processing time. However, unwanted spurious signals caused by SAR hardware can be leaked in the process of converting into a digital signal through the ADC(Analog-Digital Converter) and added in a echo signal. These tones make image quality degrade significantly. In order to solve this problem, the unwanted tones need to be detected by analysing the characteristic of the noise tone and then effectively removed from raw data. In this paper, we propose a method for efficiently removing noise tone on the raw data based on the characteristic of spurious signals.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.483-491
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• 2005

SAR signal processing technique has been considered a crucial technical part in order to generate an image from radar signal data and ADD (Agency for Defense Development) has focused on this area for years to develope our own SAR Processor for various SAR systems (Radarsat, ERS, KOMSAR). In this paper, we investigated major techniques related to generation of SAR images and developed ASPR (ADD SAR Processor for Radarsat) practically using the commercial Radarsat-1 radar signal data (RAW). We demonstrated the performance of the ASPR in comparison with the image generated by MDA and Vexcel's SAR Processor (FOCUS).

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.75-86
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• 2010

As the performance of the spaceborne SAR has been dramatically enhanced and demonstrated through advanced missions such as TerraSAR and LRO(Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), the need for highly sophisticated and efficient SAR processor is also highlighted. In Korea, the activity of SAR researches has been mainly concerned with SAR image applications and the current SAR raw data studies are mostly limited to stripmap mode cases. The first Korean spaceborne SAR is scheduled to be operational from 2010 and expected to deliver vast amount of SAR raw data acquired from multiple operational scenarios including ScanSAR mode. Hence there will be an increasing demand to implement ground processing systems that enable to analyze the acquired ScanSAR data and generate corresponding images. In this paper, we have developed an efficient ScanSAR processor that can be directly applied to spaceborne ScanSAR mode data. The SPECAN(Spectrum Analysis) algorithm is employed for this purpose and its performance is verified through RADARSAT-1 ScanSAR raw data taken over Korean peninsular. An efficient quick-look processing is carried out to produce a wide-swath SAR image and compared with the conventional RDA processing case.