Physical models for SAR speckle simulation

In this paper a SAR simulator able to provide images with the appropriate speckle statistics is introduced. It requires as inputs the radar and surface parameters and it is able to evaluate the number of equivalent scatterers per resolution cell, N. The statistics relevant to each single equivalent scatterer in the resolution cell are effectively generated and the global statistics of the return from the resolution cell are obtained as the coherent sum of the contributions pertaining to each equivalent scatterer. The rationale of the proposed simulation framework is presented, along with significant results regarding the analysis of the simulated images.