Automated Impulse Response Detection and Analysis in Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery

A well-formed synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image is composed of the superposition of impulse responses (IPRs) from all of the objects within a scene. Resolution in a SAR image is defined by the mainlobe width of the IPR. An important question to ask is whether a SAR image supports the parameters that the sensor was tasked to collect. An inspection of IPRs in a SAR image can determine if the tasked resolution was achieved; however, manually locating viable IPRs in a SAR image to analyze can be very challenging, as images can become very large. In this paper, we introduce an automated method for detecting and analyzing IPRs within SAR images to determine if focused images reflect the resolution the sensors were tasked to collect. The automated method introduced computes a series of metrics on candidate IPRs found from the detection stage, which are used to generate a confidence score.