Optimal speckle reduction in polarimetric SAR imagery

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. The optimal method for combining the elements of the scattering matrix to minimize image speckle is derived, and 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|² detectors is compared with that of the optimal polarimetric detector (OPD). A novel, constant-false-alarm-rate (CFAR) detector (the adaptive PWF) is as a simple alternative to the OPD for detecting targets in clutter. This algorithm estimates the polarization covariance of the clutter, uses the 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     

Optimal polarimetric processing for enhanced target detection

The results of a study of several polarimetric target detection algorithms are summarized. The algorithms were tested using real target-in-clutter data collected by the Lincoln Laboratory 35 GHz synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor. Fully polarimetric measurements (HH, HV, VV) are processed into intensity imagery using adaptive and nonadaptive polarimetric whitening filters (PWFs). Then a two-parameter constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector is run over the imagery to detect the targets. Nonadaptive PWF processed imagery is shown to provide better protection performance than either adaptive PWF processed imagery or single-polarimetric-channel HH imagery. In addition, nonadaptive PWF processed imagery is shown to be visually clearer than adaptive processed imagery