Wavelet transform based SAR processing and products distribution system

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging allows the remote sensing community to globally study land and sea based physical phenomena with ever finer accuracy and reliability. Time domain SAR processors for optimum resolution and frequency domain SAR processors based on the FFT for fast image throughput with reduced resolution have been developed by various establishments. Over the last few years the wavelet transform has been applied to a wide range of signal and image processing applications with significant success. It has proved particularly successful in nonstationary applications such as radar and sonar detection and in image compression codec design where improved quality is obtained using the subband compression. The key processing features of SAR are: (a) SAR image processing is a time-varying problem; (b) speckle noise makes interpretation of the processed image difficult and, (c) browsing and archiving requirements for SAR are complicated due to the excessive amount of data involved. This paper is concerned with the use of the wavelet transform as an alternative to the FFT for several aspects of synthetic aperture radar image production and analysis. A new Improved Resolution MultiScale SAR Processor (IRMS) and its relative performance to the conventional multilook FFT SAR processor is given. A new wavelet transform based SAR digital image product distribution strategy is presented.