Empirical estimation of the ERS-1 SAR radiometric resolution

Abstract

This letter describes a technique to evaluate the radiometric quality of distributed target responses extracted from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The approach is original in that it aims to estimate the Equivalent Number of Looks of clustered pixels, a parameter which summarizes the first order statistics of speckle. This empirical method can be applied to processed, interpolated, and even speckle-filtered, SAR images. Using ERS-1 Precision Image SAR data, it is shown, first, how to discriminate between uniform and non-uniform targets, and, then, to estimate the radiometric resolution of pixels gathered according to several clustering schemes.