Generic Processing Of SAR Complex Data Using the SICD Standard in Matlab

The number of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors and associated data formats is increasing slowly now but will soon multiply. While the specifics of how these SAR systems collect, process and format their data will be different in detail, it is desirable to analyze their data in a common, agnostic, way. This desire is frequently confounded by the fact that SAR data from different sources are often provided in vastly different formats and conventions for expressing supporting metadata. This paper presents an open source MATLAB framework for reading, writing and analyzing SAR complex imagery that is consistent across a wide variety of SAR systems. This is achieved by casting their data into a Sensor Independent Complex Data (SICD) format. The underlying motivation for this approach is the realization that the geophysical information content of SAR complex image data far outstrips that afforded by real-valued pixel imagery and should be used to best advantage.