Effects of foliage on the formation of K-distributed SAR imagery

The paper introduces two novelties, with respect to the state of the art, on the analysis of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image formation. The first refers to the effects of non-homogeneous terrain (i.e., different types of terrain in the remotely sensed scene), while the second considers the presence of vegetation on the terrain. The nonhomogeneity of the terrain is accounted for by resorting to the K-distributed clutter model. The model is made of two terms: the texture, which accounts for the spatial variability of the scene contents, and the speckle, that codes the fluctuations in the imaged cell. The presence of vegetation on the terrain is introduced by a suitable Doppler spectrum of the speckle. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.