A toolbox dedicated to the analysis of airborne SAR sea clutter data

Abstract

The characterization of the sea clutter spatial and statistical properties is a challenging problem for improving the detection performances of any radar system confronted with strong sea clutter perturbations. On the one hand, the use of radar scatterometry made it possible to precisely determine the behavior of the sea surface backscattering coefficient and to confirm electromagnetic models. On the other hand, the imaging of the ocean by radar has been studied extensively and has led to a mature theory of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging of the ocean. Nevertheless the manipulations of SAR data are handicapped by the size of data. In order to analyze SAR data, we need a very flexible tool well adapted to these data. This paper briefly presents the inner functioning of a software (i.e. the different choices of class organization and how it is convenient to use them) based on a multilook philosophy (spectral sub bands processing) and on Octave script. Then we specify the type of operations and processings, we can perform using this software. Two examples of use are presented which show the easiness of use of this software.