Principal components dynamic block quantization for multichannel SAR

This paper concerns the on-board data volume reduction for a single-platform multichannel Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system. In such a system, the unambiguous Doppler spectrum reconstructed on-ground is enlarged at the cost of an increased amount of acquired data. Since the signals received by a multichannel SAR instrument are intrinsically correlated, such correlation can be exploited to represent the signals in a smaller set of components, introducing a controlled distortion. This way, a reduced amount of data can be quantized and transmitted on-ground. Data simulations have been performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. By analysis of the simulation results, efficient reduction of data volume is achieved, even keeping low enough the additional distortion introduced in the reconstructed data.