Radar cross-section estimation of SAR images

We present an algorithm that is able to smooth out the speckle from many SAR images and which does not suffer from the drawbacks of multilooking. The algorithm is able to preserve the detail and resolution of the original image while producing a smooth, real-valued output. In many cases the quality of the smoothed image is sufficiently high that it may be used with standard optical post-processing algorithms. We use a global optimization method (simulated annealing) and single point gamma statistics to find the MAP solution for the radar cross- section. However, this method may also be regarded as an ideal adaptive filter that is both computationally efficient and highly parallelizable. Results are presented for airborne, ERS-1 and multi-temporal SAR images.© (1995) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.