Evaluation of SAR Image Quality

Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) is an active micro­wave instrument that performs high-resolution observation under almost all weather conditions. Although there are many advantages of SAR instrument, many complicated steps are involved in order to generate SAR image products. Many research and algorithms have been proposed to process radar signal and to increase the quality of SAR products. However, it is hard to find research which compare the quality of SAR products generated with different algorithms and processing methods. In our previous research, a SAR processing s/w was developed for a ground station. In addition, quality assessment procedures and their test parameters inside a SAR processor was proposed. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the quality of SAR images generated from the developed SAR processing s/w. However, If there are no direct measurements such as radar reflector or scattering field measurement values it is difficult to compare SAR images generated with different methods. An alternative procedures and parameters for SAR image quality evaluation are presented and the problems involved in the comparison methods are discussed. Experiments based on real data have been conducted to evaluate and analyze quality of SAR images.