Coherent images of natural scenes formed using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) often possess textural properties associated with the clutter. Due to a recent improvement in the Defence Research Agency (DRA) X band SAR, very high resolution imagery is now available for analysis. This increase in resolution has visibly modified the textural properties of observed clutter forcing a re-examination of the statistical image properties. The results of this study are given. Areas of imagery that appear homogeneous have their single point distribution properties measured. Comparisons with known distributions that often fit similar data are made and shown to give poor agreement. Reasons for poor agreement, such as inhomogeneity, are investigated through the use of clutter simulations. K and lognormal mixture distributions are shown to offer good agreement with the observed distributions and also validate the premise of homogeneity for the regions considered.

Date Published: 21 November 1995
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 2584, Synthetic Aperture Radar and Passive Microwave Sensing, (21 November 1995); doi: 10.1117/12.227120

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2584:
Synthetic Aperture Radar and Passive Microwave Sensing
Giorgio Franceschetti; Christopher John Oliver; James C. Shiue; Shahram Tajbakhsh, Editor(s)