Comparison of Several Techniques to Obtain Multiple-Look SAR Imagery

Synthetic aperture radar imagery is contaminated by coherent speckle noise. In order to improve interpretability, multiple-look images are usually generated. In this paper, we examine the performance of several classes of techniques to generate such multiple-look imagery. The detailed impulse responses and the signal-to-speckle noise ratios obtained by the various techniques are presented. It is found that by using several types of image domain filters, the signal-to-speckle noise ratio can be improved over the conventional discrete mixed-integrator while keeping the equivalent rectangular resolution constant.