Radiometric resolution optimization for future SAR systems

This paper presents a radiometric resolution optimization strategy which can be used in new generation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems. An expression, which allows optimization depending on application, has been developed for this purpose. In particular, special effort has been made for improving the radiometric resolution keeping the geometric resolution constant. Optimization examples have been carried out with realistic parameters taken from TerraSAR-X. The objective is to provide an effective and realistic way to tradeoff the instrument parameters for optimal exploitation of SAR images. Furthermore, a precise SNR formulation has been derived including processing gain and noise distribution