Customer Reviews

Spotlight-Mode Synthetic Aperture Radar: A Signal Processing Approach

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book was a major disappointment given the previous "5 star" rating and high price. I quit reading the book after 56 pages.

As stated on page 34, a major assumption for the spotlight SAR processing appears to be that the wavefront "curves are well approximated with straight lines." Five pages later an example produces a 1500 m synthetic aperture length requirement for 1 m resolution at a 50 km standoff distance. The range migration for this example is $[(50e3)^2+(1500/2)^2]^{1/2}-50e3$, or 5.6 m. This is 6 range bins. Nowhere in the ensuing 17 pages is the magnitude of this effect discussed or treatment for it mentioned.

The treatment of the projection-slice theorem refers the reader to Appendix A for a one page generalization of the rotation property of Fourier transforms. A simple version could have been incorporated directly in the demonstration of the theorem and made the theorem more readable.

On page 45, "1 foot" is also referred to as "0.33 meters." One foot is exactly 0.3048 meters, or, when rounded to two digits, 0.30 meters. Alternatively, 0.33 meters is 1.083 feet, or, when rounded to two digits, 1.1 feet (although 1.1 feet is 0.34 meters when rounded to two digits). In any case, the arithmetic presented in the book is sloppy.

The "folksy" style adds lots of words and little substance to the presentation. Most technical authors do not find it necessary to refer to "mathematical" expressions when presenting equations since this is a fundamental part of the language for technical writing. There are several references to material which will be discussed later, which turns out to be minor. This disrupts the flow of the presentation, adding words but not content or connections. The presentation for the linear FM chirp is disjointed. The presentation in Curlander and McDonough is much better and produces a terminology that is clear and meaningful through the remainder of their book.

The book also uses notation that is inconsistent with other radar books. This makes it difficult to use the book as a reference because the meaning the terms used in the equations is not clear.

I think not enough practicing engineers are reviewing this book. I work in the radar imaging field and everyone I talk to at work loves this book. I just started in this field a few months back and I've found this to be much better than Carrera for learning about SAR imaging.

What's great about this book is that it is both clear and concise, which is very difficult to do. I feel like after having read the first two chapters I understand the SAR image formation theory. The tomographic paradigm explored in this book is so much easier to understand than the Doppler filtering ideas presented in other texts. It just makes sense.

The third chapter is also great because it basically gets into the details of how the operations in chapter two are actually performed. The author does a great job of building on the basic theory with incrementally understandable improvements (polar formatting, FFTs, windowing, etc.).

As someone just recently starting out I was able to pick up chapter four before anything else and understand and apply the Phase Gradient Autofocus method, which is also elegantly simple.

I'm currently reading the section on Interferometry, which I also find to be useful. I do wish there was some information on using interferometry (horizontal baseline) to detect and geolocate moving targets, but that can't be held against the author since that's a different field more applicable to range-Doppler imaging and MTI.

This is one of those rare text books that I actually enjoy and I feel is applicable to both the novice and experienced engineer alike.

This book describes the PGA algorithm which is used extensively in all modern SAR systems. A clear and broad treatment of SAR processing. This should be the first SAR book you reach for. It's nice to read about algorithms from the originators for a change.