Spotlight-Mode Synthetic Aperture Radar: A Signal Processing Approach: A Signal Processing Approach

I don't know where my last review went, but here goes again. As was already said, there's not enough practicing SAR engineers and scientists reviewing this book. It's the best one out there. If you haven't read this book, you don't understand spotlight SAR the way you're supposed to understand it. It's the only one I've encountered (and I've read bunches of them) that coherently describes the process of turning a bunch of collected radar pulses into an image. The writing style makes the book enjoyable to read. You aren't going to find anything close to the completeness of this book's explanation of slant plane geometry and its effects on images. (But you aren't going to find any other book as complete as this one in regard to any of the fundamental things you need to know.) Yes, there are differences in terminology used. There's a very good reason for those differences and the terms are very completely defined. Work with the book and don't fight it and your appreciation for other terminologies will decrease.

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.