Real-time smart optical SAR signal processor

Optoelectronic SAR signal processing for real-time parallel adaptive on-board wide area surveillance and ATR applications is described. The signal processing architecture consists of a coarse ATR processor that performs early detection of small targets to select regions of interest in a large field of view, and a fine ATR processor for accurate classification of selected targets. Both coarse and fine ATR processors apply circular correlation-based algorithms implemented with optical joint transform correlators. Together with associative memory and genetic algorithm composite filtering, this discriminates among similar targets and rejects cluttered backgrounds.