Optimal processing of polarimetric synthetic-aperture radar imagery

stationary ground targets—during the day or night—even through cloud cover, fog, smoke, dust, or rain. The sensor is a coherent, fully polarimetric, 35-GHz synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) with a resolution of 1 ft × 1 ft. And, to minimize SAR speckle while preserving image resolution, it uses the polarimetric whitening filter, our recently developed method for processing fully polarimetric data into SAR imagery. The Advanced Detection Technology Sensor (ADTS) is a fully polarimetric, 35-GHz syn-thetic-aperture radar. The polarimetric capa-bility of the radar is used to enhance the quality of the imagery taken from a small aircraft; the synthetic aperture permits data to be processed to a resolution of 1 ft by 1 ft at a slant range of 7 km. The sensor was developed to provide a high-quality database of clutter and target-in-clutter imagery, and to perform station