FOLIAGE PENETRATION EXPERIMENT .3. MULTICHANNEL WHITENING OF SAR IMAGERY

The presence of speckle in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery make s image interpretation more difficult and worsens the performance of a lgorithms designed to detect objects in the imagery. Image processing techniques to reduce speckle usually do so at the expense of spatial r esolution Multichannel whitening is one image processing technique tha t reduces image speckle while maintaining spatial resolution. Multicha nnel whitening is applied to imagery recorded during a foliage penetra tion experiment undertaken by MIT Lincoln Laboratory using the NASA/JP L UHF, L-, C-band fully polarimetric SAR in July 1990. In this experim ent, a 50 km(2) forested area near Portage, Maine was imaged. Twenty-s even 8 ft trihedral corner reflectors were arrayed throughout the imag ed area beneath the foliage in order to measure foliage attenuation Th e detection performance for corner reflectors under foliage is compare d for the raw data and whitened data, and the predictions of a product model for the degree of speckle reduction are compared with the data.