Abstract: A novel fast algorithm for re
al time SAR imaging is presented to decrease the volume of compression computati
on. For any size sequence, a scheme and procedure for zero-padding-decompositi
on FFT are proposed and optimized to minimize computation operations. This algor
ithm lowers the computational volume of zero padding FFT in SAR imaging, improve
s the performance of real time SAR imaging on a parallel processor, increases th
e throughput and decreases the imaging delay.

Key words: real time SAR imaging, zero-padding-decomposition FFT, parallel processing