An Area-Based Projection Algorithm for SAR Radiometric Terrain Correction and Geocoding

This article describes a projection algorithm between radar and map coordinates based on the representation of radar samples as area elements (AEs) rather than point elements. Each AE on the map grid (geographic grid) is associated with a number of radar grid samples that intersect completely or partially the AE. The association enables the geocoding (i.e., the map projection of radar imagery) with adaptive multilooking, accurately accounting for all radar samples contributing to the geocoded elements according to topography and radar geometry. By using averaging rather than interpolation, the proposed projection does not suffer from interpolation overfitting. The area-based geocoding also enables the generation of the geocoded polarimetric covariance matrix (GCOV) and geocoded synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferograms with adaptive multilooking. Analogously, the slant-range projection of geocoded data is improved by projecting geographic grid pixels onto the radar grid according to their corresponding location based on the radar geometry without leaving gaps. This approach is used to reduce the computation time of previously published radiometric terrain correction (RTC) algorithms, performing 3.6–6.5 times faster over multilooked data and up to 26.3 times faster over single-look data. We demonstrate the strengths of the proposed area projection (AP) algorithm for RTC and geocoding using Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle SAR (UAVSAR), Sentinel-1B, and ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 data, and evaluate the results in the context of the upcoming NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) mission.