Patent ID: 8344934

Claim:
A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system comprising: a radar transmitter configured to generate a plurality of radar transmission pulses; a radar receiver coupled to a radar aperture and configured to receive a plurality of reflected radar pulses corresponding to the plurality of radar transmission pulses having been reflected from a target region; a processing controller configured to divide the target region into a plurality of tiles and to process a portion of the plurality of reflected radar pulses to generate pulse data corresponding to a respective one of the plurality of tiles in a highest data layer of a plurality of data layers, and to conduct a plurality of iterations, each corresponding to one of the plurality of data layers, of dividing each of the plurality of tiles into a plurality of sub-tiles corresponding to a lower data layer and to recursively process the pulse data associated with each of the plurality of tiles in a higher data layer to generate pulse data corresponding to each of the plurality of sub-tiles of the lower data layer; and an image processor configured to generate a radar image of the target region based on the pulse data corresponding to each of the plurality of sub-tiles associated with a lowest data layer of the plurality of data layers.