MATLAB tools for EnviSAT ASAR data visualization and image enhancement

Abstract

Advanced synthetic aperture radar (ASAR) is an all-weather, day-and-night and high-resolution imaging instrument carried out by EnviSat. Planetary missions related to Earth surface observation benefit from ASAR. Conventionally, EnviView is used to decode ASAR data and display ASAR data information and images. However, EnviView has very limited functions and is unable to export meaningful images when the data was acquired in some bad weather condition such as after heavy rain as the data is distorted by various factors such as the soil moisture. Furthermore, EnviView is not user friendly and not flexible to use. This paper presents a user-friendly ASAR data visualization and image enhancement toolbox based on the very popular MATLAB software environment. The image enhancement is important for meaningful image analysis and accurate target identification of poor data due to weather or other environment factors. A case study is presented with image enhancement for a poor ASAR data.