In region surveillance applications, sensors oftentimes accumulate an overwhelmingly large amount of data, making it infeasible to process all of the collected data in real-time. For example, a multi-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) flown on an airborne platform could receive on the order of 10 GBits of data per second. This data can be exploited in a number of ways (e.g., constructing a detected image, applying an ATR algorithm, or performing moving target processing) each of which requires significant computational resources. Given the enormous amount of data and the correspondingly large number of potential exploitation algorithms, there simply are not enough computational resources to process all of the data with all possible exploitation algorithms. The natural question then becomes one of how to most effectively utilize limited processing resources so as to facilitate real time exploitation of the collected data. This paper presents an information theoretic approach for ...
Christopher M. Kreucher, Kevin M. Carter