Elements of Data Analysis and Image Processing with R

This chapter discusses some fundamental background and tools about the data analysis, as the statistical properties of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are extremely important for SAR image processing. It also introduces the spatial property of SAR images and some operations about image processing. It is well known that many useful R functions come in packages, free libraries of code written by R's active user community. Since SAR data are numerical, some simple and useful descriptive statistical quantities are given, which are widely used for SAR data analysis. Data visualization is very important at showing a full scene about the distribution of data whose dimension is no larger than three. The quantities and the visualization tools can be directly applied to explore the randomness of the image. There are a few packages for the R language that ease the visualization of images. Among them, imagematrix stands out for its simplicity.