Optimal Speckle Reduction In Pol-SAR Imagery And Its Effect On Target Detection

Leslie M. Novak; Michael C. Burl

doi:10.1117/12.960517

14 August 1989 Optimal Speckle Reduction In Pol-SAR Imagery And Its Effect On Target Detection

Leslie M. Novak, Michael C. Burl

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 1101, Millimeter Wave and Synthetic Aperture Radar; (1989) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.960517
Event: SPIE 1989 Technical Symposium on Aerospace Sensing, 1989, Orlando, FL, United States

Abstract

Speckle is a major cause of degradation in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. With the availability of fully polarimetric SAR data, it is possible to use the three complex elements (HH, HV, VV) of the polarimetric scattering matrix to reduce speckle. This paper derives the optimal method for combining the elements of the scattering matrix to minimize image speckle; the solution is shown to be a polarimetric whitening filter (PWF). A simulation of spatially correlated, K-distributed, fully polarimetric clutter is then used to compare the PWF with other, suboptimal speckle-reduction methods. Target detection performance of the PWF, span, and single-channel |HH| detectors is compared with the optimal polarimetric detector (OPD). Finally, a new, constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector (the adaptive PWF) is proposed as a simple alternative to the OPD for detecting targets in clutter. This algorithm estimates the polarization covariance of the clutter, uses this covariance to construct the minimum speckle image, and then tests for the presence of a target. An exact theoretical analysis of the adaptive PWF is presented; the algorithm is shown to have detection performance comparable with that of the OPD.

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Leslie M. Novak and Michael C. Burl "Optimal Speckle Reduction In Pol-SAR Imagery And Its Effect On Target Detection", Proc. SPIE 1101, Millimeter Wave and Synthetic Aperture Radar, (14 August 1989); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.960517

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