An introduction to strip-mapping synthetic aperture radar

Strip-mapping synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a microwave imaging system capable of producing high resolution terrain images from data collected by a relatively small airborne or spaceborne antenna. Although strip-mapping SAR has been widely covered in the technical literature for at least 25 years, this literature tends to be inaccessible to researchers outside of the radar community due to the following factors: use of unfamiliar terminology, assumption of a prior understanding of basic radar signal processing, and the use of a Doppler viewpoint. In this paper we derive and discuss the fundamental strip-mapping SAR imaging equations from first principles, with radar terminology minimized. The role of the Doppler effect is clarified. Although this paper is fairly elementary, it is hoped that it might serve as a bridge for the signal processing community to the existing literature on strip-mapping SAR.