Patent ID: 8482452

Claim:
A method for generating a synthetic aperture radar image frame for a target down-track location from return signals acquired by receivers from signals emitted by transmitters at multiple down-track locations, the return signal including, for transmitter and receiver pairs, a number of samples indicating amplitude of the return signal, each sample corresponding to a time at which the signal emitted by that transmitter was acquired by that receiver, the method comprising: for each down-track location, for each transmitter, performing a plane-to-plane propagation of the return signals acquired by receivers from the signal emitted by that transmitter at that down-track location to generate a contribution image frame; and generating a contribution from that transmitter to the real aperture image for that down-track location using an aperture weighting function to generate a weighted sum of a component of that contribution from each receiver at that down-track location; and generating a real aperture image for that down-track location by summing the contributions from each transmitter; and summing the real aperture images for successive down-track locations into a synthetic aperture image for the target down-track location.