Abstract
The most recent and advanced synthetic aperture sensors are able to work in different operating modes and are currently being installed in an increasing variety of platforms. In order to be ready to process data generated not only by these new sensors but by the incoming ones, it is important to identify the common processing blocks. For instance, different chirp scaling algorithm implementations have been analyzed to derive an approach of the same algorithm being able to process raw data in StripMap, ScanSAR and SpotLight operating modes. Next to the Radar imaging techniques, the processing software has been developed to be able to dynamically adapt its performance to the memory and CPU resources. Maximum portability has also been one of the major tasks and the same code runs under IBM and SUN UNIX, Linux and Windows 32 bits platforms. Finally, Extended Markup Language (XML) standard has been adopted for parameter, setup and report files to improve the user experience. The processing kernel and the specific modules for each operating
mode and platform have been validated using raw data from ERS-1, RADARSAT and DLR while to validate SpotLight mode, simulated data has been used for both air- and space borne platforms.
