Optimal Speckle Reduction In Polarimetric Sar Imagery*

Speckle is a major cause of degradation in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. With the availability of fully polarimetric, high-resolu tion SAR data, it is possible to use the three complex elements (HH, HV, VV) of the polarimetric scattering matrix to reduce this speckle. The optimal method of combining the elements of the scattering matrix to minimize image speckle is derived; the solution is shown to be a polari- metric whitening filter (PWF). Also, a simulation of spatially correlated, K-distributed, fully polarimetric clutter is developed and is used to compare the optimal speckle reduction method with other, suboptimal methods. Finally, the target detection performance of span, single-channel|HH|/sup 2/ data, and the PWF are compared with the optimal polarimetric detector (OPD).