Signal Processing Issues for the Exploitation of Pulse-to….pdfVIP

1048 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 46, NO. 4, APRIL 2008 Signal Processing Issues for the Exploitation of Pulse-to-Pulse Encoding SAR Transponders John Peter Merryman Boncori, Member, IEEE, and Giovanni Schiavon, Member, IEEE Abstract—Synthetic aperture radar signal processing issues re- lated to the exploitation of a pulse-to-pulse encoding transponder using pseudorandom codes discussed analytically. Namely the focusing algorithm, the code synchronization procedure and the properties of the code induced gain against non-encoding point scatterers and distributed ones. A time-domain processing algo- rithm and a code synchronization procedure are proposed and validated on simulated data and on a European Remote Sensing Satellite-2 data set containing prototypes of such a device. The interaction of the transponder signal with terrain backscattering is analyzed by deriving parameters that are useful for performance assessment. These are related to the relevant parameters in radio- metric calibration, interferometric applications, and tagging. Index Terms—Azimuth phase coding, synthetic aperture radar Fig. 1. Block diagram of the pulse-to-pulse encoding SAR transponder pro- (SAR) signal processing, SAR transponder, time-domain correla- posed in [4]. Each received SAR pulse is amplified in the receiver front end tion (TDC). and split onto two branches through a power divider. In the bottom branch, a modulating signal is derived. The clock formation block generates a triggering signal for the subsequent bin