Quantitative assessment of physical information retrieved via multidimensional radar systems

The advent of multidimensional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems in the last decade has made possible the quantitative retrieval of physical parameters to characterize the Earth´s surface. As a result, nowadays, radar technology has an important and leading role in remote sensing. Despite the clear advantages respect to other remote sensing techniques, the presence of speckle noise in SAR systems represents still an important drawback, which is even more critical for multidimensional systems. This paper is devoted to present a novel multidimensional speckle noise model which, as demonstrated, allows the characterization of multidimensional data and permits to identify and quantify the effects of speckle in the process to estimate physical information. Special attention is devoted to polarimetric systems