Upgrade of real-time CARABAS-II image formation and change detection

Authors:

  • Daniel Murdin
  • Björn Flood
  • Per-Olov Frölind
  • Gustav Haapahlati
  • Lars Ulander

Publish date: 2008-05-21

Report number: FOI-R--2371--SE

Pages: 22

Written in: English

Keywords:

  • Real-time
  • processing
  • CARABAS
  • SAR
  • FBP
  • change detection
  • back-lobe

Abstract

The real-time processor for CARABAS-II has been upgraded. The real-time processorperforms all parts in the processing chain from radar data to target detections. All processing steps are separate processes working on blocks of data, enabling real-time data-flow, process distribution, parallelization and automatic load balancing. The realtime processor can handle a continuous flow of in-data and supply a continuous flow of processed data, the requirement is however not that it can handle the data rates of a realistic scenario. The focus of the upgrade has been in 3 main areas. Firstly, improvements to increase the user friendliness of the system were done. This includes upgrades to userinterfaces, adding of template files and central installation of the environment. Secondly the system was upgraded to handle new radar data files from a new mode of CARABAS-II with alternating transmission on left and right side of aircraft (ping-pong mode). Reading of these files as well as configuration options to enable selection of which data to process has been added. Thirdly, a method for performing back-lobe suppression, using the data from the new mode has been developed and implemented as a module. The back-lobe suppression has been tested on a case and shows promising results. Many minor bugs have been corrected and several minor modifications also been done to the software.