Optical SAR Processing and Target Recognition
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is effectively a microwave hologram
of the illuminated area, so by recording this data on film optical processing
becomes the natural approach to forming an image of the ground.
Historically, this was one of the earliest and most successful
optical processors, although the images were not formed in real time.
We have demonstrated a real-time high-resolution tilted-plane optical
SAR processor
cascaded into an optical correlator for automatic target recognition.
We have incorporated
real-time input to the SAR processor using a photoanisotropic hologram,
and real-time multilook averaging for speckle reduction.
This is the first cascading of these two optical processors,
the first successful demonstration of real-time input to
a high-resolution, space-integrating, tilted plane optical SAR processor,
and the first demonstration of video rate
multilook averaging using a ferroelectric liquid crystal shutter array.
[ Journal Publication:
1,
23
Conference Publications:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
7,
26 ]
SAR ATR summary
SAR processor
Lab Photo
Postscript viewgraph of Optical SAR Processing and Target Recognition
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