2025/04/29 by Alessandro Giovagnoli, Giovagnoli, Alessandro, Sigurd Huber +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.20811
openalex publication_date 2025/04/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a well established technology in the field of Earth remote sensing. Over the years, the resolution of SAR images has been steadily improving and the pixel count increasing as a result of advances in the sensor technology, and so have the computational resources required to process the raw data to a focused image. Because they are a necessary step in the study of the retrieved data, new high-resolution and low-complexity focusing algorithms are constantly explored in the SAR literature. The theory of quantum computing proposes a new computational framework that might allow to process a vast amount of data in a more efficient way. Relevant to our case is the advantage proven for the quantum Fourier transform (QFT), the quantum counterpart of a fundamental element of many SAR focusing algorithms. Motivated by this, in this work we propose a quantum version of the range-Doppler algorithm. We show how in general reference functions, a key element in many SAR focusing algorithms, can be mapped to quantum gates; we present the quantum circuit performing the SAR raw data focusing and we discuss in detail its computational complexity. We find that the core of the quantum range-Doppler algorithm has a computational complexity, namely the number of single- and two-qubit gates, of O(N), less than its classical counterpart with computational complexity O(N log N).