An airborne interferometric quick-look processing algorithm

A technique to get real-time interferograms and coherence maps for an airborne interferometric synthetic aperture radar (INSAR) system is presented. For this purpose, Extended Chirp Scaling (ECS) auto-registration imaging algorithm is used, which realizes the registration at raw data processing stage by considering the quadratic approximation for the path difference caused by the baseline between the two antennas. It reduces the misregistration term greatly and there will not be the step of registration in the algorithm. Also some factors that influence the standard deviation of the INSAR phase are analyzed. In addition, other techniques such as downsampling, multi-look processing, and fast coherence computation are also adopted. And the algorithm is proved to generate interferograms and coherence maps in real-time.