Analysis of the detection performance of coherent scatterers in SAR images

Abstract

Research efforts have been spent in developing processing algorithms for the detection of the so-called Coherent Scatterers (CS’s). CS’s are characterized by point-like scattering behaviour (commonly associated with high scattering amplitudes, deterministic phases, high spectral correlation and high interferometric coherence values) and, differently from the PS technique, using only a single SAR image. The CS detection approaches are mainly based on spectral correlation techniques by evaluating sublook images (i.e. images using only a portion of the available bandwidth) in range or azimuth direction. Furthermore, this kind of scatterers is valuable for a wide spectrum of applications in different natural and urban scattering scenarios, ranging from image calibration to object characterization and information extraction. The objective of this paper is to present an analysis of the performance obtained by different CS detection methods. This analysis is carried out with simulated data and with TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X data. Finally, a comparison between theoretical and real data results will be done.