Control systems principles applied to speckle filtering and geophysical information extraction in multi-channel SAR images

Two new Bayesian vector speckle filters have been developed for multi-channel SAR images. Since these filters present the structure of data fusion control systems, their application is the first processing step of application-oriented control systems designed to exploit the synergy of SAR sensors. The authors present such a control system, to retrieve soil roughness and soil moisture using ERS and Radarsat images. Results show that the new speckle filters present convincing performances for speckle reduction, for texture preservation and for small scene objects detection. The retrieval of soil roughness and soil moisture through Bayesian data fusion of ERS and Radarsat data provides also valuable results.