The concept of the polarimetric matched signal and image filters: application to radar target versus clutter optimal discrimination

Speckle reduction has long been recognized as the main problem of coherent imaging and many processing techniques have been advanced to overcome it. The vast majority of these techniques, however, are of a scalar nature simply because vector/matrix imaging data are so sparse and have become available only very recently. Such data, which was taken with the NASA/JPL CV-990 dual-polarization L-band (1.225 GHz) SAR (synthetic aperture radar) system, have been made available to the author. He investigated the potential of an exclusively polarimetric image filtering approach, which takes full advantage of the matrix data provided on a pixel-by-pixel basis, and complements the existing scalar contrast optimization and speckle reduction techniques. The goal is contrast optimization without the help of incoherent averaging over pixels/looks, because of the corresponding loss of spatial or temporal resolution