GDAL SoC Ideas/SAR Processor

Overview

Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) data requires significant processing after acquisition. Since SAR tends to be a very specialized field, there are very few open source applications that specialize in manipulating processed data, much less processing raw data. The goal of this project then would be:

Create as generic as possible a SAR Level 0 product processor using the Range-Doppler Algorithm
Enhance and extend GDAL's capabilities for reading Level 0 products from a variety of platforms (one point worth investigating is some airborne platforms such as the CV-580)
Use GDAL to serialize the resulting image data, be it a GeoTIFF or some other format desired

There are presently no open source applications that are capable of processing Level 0 products, and this is something people have indicated they would desire in the past.

Proposed Schedule

TBD

Implementation Details

Initial Goals

Establish a library providing basic mathematical functionality needed: Fast Fourier Transforms, certain types of filter kernel generation, matrix operations, interpolations, chirp generation, etc... as needed (and as can be borrowed from elsewhere)
Ensure that GDAL is up to reading Level 0 SAR data for RADARSAT-1 (this will be the initial test platform) data.
Design a system that is flexible and modular so that a variety of processing algorithms can be implemented in the future such as Omega-K and SPECAN.

Range Doppler Algorithm

Implement the majority of the Range Doppler Algorithm, both documented in Ian Cummings and Frank Wong's book, as well as in a variety of technically significant papers.

Range FFT/matched filter generation
Range Cell Migration Correction
Azimuth FFT
etc...

Image Processing Toolkit

TBD

this is a work in progress...