Quicklook processing for RADARSAT data

Most applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), especially in natural disaster monitoring, need SAR data processing in real-time or near real-time. However, it is difficult to process the whole data precisely in time on a common computing platform. Quick look processor (QLP) is developed to enable someone to browse large volumes of SAR data at low resolutions, thus obtaining an overview of scene content, only some regions of interest will be processed for high resolution. This paper presents a fast QLP to process the RADARSAT raw data in near real-time mode on a SGI workstation, using fftw library another QLP on PC platform is developed