Multi-look versus single-look processing of synthetic aperture radar images with respect to ocean wave spectra estimation

Abstract

Full-bandwidth C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data are compared with 7-look and 3-look data. The peak-to-background ratio of the image intensity power spectrum describing the wave detectability is found to be on average 8-9dB higher for the 7-look data and 2-5dB higher for the 3-look data than the single-look data. This is mainly due to the decrease in the speckle noise level when going from single-look to multi-look processing. In addition, look-sum processing is evaluated against spectral-sum processing for various temporal look separations. A significant improvement in image spectral peak contrast is observed for the spectral-sum data versus the look-sum data, with increasing temporal separations between the looks. No such improvement is observed in the corresponding image spectral noise contrast parameter. These observations are in agreement with the spatial misregistration inherent in look-sum data. Finally, the acceleration contribution to the observed aximuth smearing in the spectra is found to be negligible compared with the velocity smearing contribution.