Roughness parameters estimation of sea surface from SAR images

Some knowledge of sea state and conditions is input in ship detection algorithms based on inversion of scattering models for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. This paper shows a novel technique for the estimation of roughness parameters of the sea surface from SAR images. The estimation procedure is based on the minimization of the absolute error between the Radar Cross Section (RCS) of the sea surface measured on the SAR image and the expected RCS computed using the Kirchhoff approach within the Geometrical Optics (GO) solution. The technique is tested on three different TerraSAR-X images acquired in November 2012 over the Portsmouth harbour in the UK.