Requirements and Tests for Phase Preservation in a SAR Processor

This paper proposes a set of tests that provide necessary and, as far as possible, sufficient conditions for verifying the phase preservation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processors. This paper discusses two different test families composed of self-consistency and point-target-based tests. The set of self-consistent tests extends the well-known CEOS-OFFSET to very different acquisition modes, namely, StripMAP, ScanSAR, TopSAR, and SPOTLIGHT, and introduces a new complementary test to check the consistency of the space-variant implementation of a processor. The set of point target tests, based on the analysis of point target simulated data, completes the self-consistent tests by providing a verification of phase accuracy between different bursts and swaths.