February Fourier Talks 2018

This talk describes the microlocal properties of Fourier integral operators which arise in inverse problems related to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging. In SAR, antennas on a trajectory are used to send electromagnetic waves to an object of interest and measures of the scattered echoes are used to find an image of the object. We consider the forward operator F which maps the image to the data, and the normal operator F*F which is used to reconstruct the image. The properties of these operators are determined by the choice of the flight trajectory. The singularities which appear here are folds, blowdowns and cusps.