Communication and sensor capability tradeoffs for wide-area surveillance systems

Future wide-area surveillance systems will collect prodigious amounts of SAR imagery. To make these systems economical, it is necessary to squeeze the large amount of SAR imagery through an available communications link. Even systems with moderate resolution and a single-polarization channel can yield stressing communications bottlenecks. Communication requirements become more acute as sensor capabilities increase; better resolution and additional polarization channels imply larger amounts of data to be transmitted. However, by applying automatic target detection and recognition (ATD/R) techniques to the imagery onboard the sensor platform, it is possible to ameliorate the communication requirements. The ATD/R algorithms identify regions of interest, where the imagery is transmitted at nominal fidelity and bit rate; the background is transmitted at lower fidelity and bit rate, thereby saving communication bandwidth. ATD/R algorithms are more effective with improved sensor capabilities, making it possible to reduce background clutter more effectively. In this paper, we show that when using this concept, sensors with improved capability require only marginally greater communication bandwidth. In some cases, sensors with improved capability require less communication bandwidth