Compression of synthetic aperture radar phase history data using trellis coded quantization techniques

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a remote-sensing technology which uses the motion of the radar transmitter to synthesize an antenna aperture much larger than the actual antenna aperture to yield high spatial resolution radar images. Trellis coded quantization (TCQ) techniques are shown to provide a high performance, low bit-error sensitivity solution to the problem of downlink data rate reduction for SAR systems. Trellis coded vector quantization (TCVQ) and universal trellis coded quantization (UTCQ) coding systems are implemented and compared with other data compression schemes (block adaptive quantization (BAQ or BFPQ) and vector quantization (VQ)) that can be used to compress SAR phase history data