Progress in Circular SAR Imaging Technique

Circular SAR (CSAR) is a newly developed all-directional high resolution 3D imaging mode in recent years, to satisfy the demand of finer observation. The National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Microwave Imaging, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (MITL, IECAS), had the first test flight experiment in Aug. 2011 with a P-band full polarization SAR system, and successfully obtained the all-directional high resolution circular SAR image. The initial results show that CSAR technique has the encouraging potential capability in the fields of high precision mapping, disaster evaluation, resource management and the other related applications. This paper firstly makes a detailed discussion on the progress of circular SAR imaging technique, which emphases on the several airborne experiments performed these years to show CSARs attractive features, then studies and illustrates the key techniques, and finally discusses the development trends.