System for reliable transmission of high-resolution imagery through a degraded data link

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) configured for transmission of imagery, the UAV comprising:

• a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to generate an image;
• and
• processing circuitry to:
• divide the image into a plurality of image tiles;
• encode each of the image tiles with metadata including an image sequence number, a number of tiles in the image, and a tile sequence number;
• generate packets for transmission by transceiver circuitry to a receiver over a data link, wherein each packet includes a single one of the encoded tiles;
• and
• decode a retransmit request comprising information indicating missing image tiles that were not received properly,
• wherein the transceiver circuitry is configured to retransmit the missing image tiles over the data link, and
• wherein a number of the missing image tiles requested by the receiver for retransmission is limited to a predetermined number.

A receiver system for reliable reception of imagery through a data link, the system comprising:

• processing circuitry;
• and memory,
• wherein the processing circuitry is configured to:
• decode packets received over the data link, each packet comprising a single encoded image tile of an image, each of the image tiles encoded with metadata including an image sequence number, a number of tiles in the image, and a tile sequence number;
• generate a retransmit request comprising a list of missing image tiles that were not received properly;
• and
• limit a number of the missing image tiles requested for retransmission to a predetermined number.