Effects of Resolution Versus Speckle in Spaceborne Radar Image Interpretation: A Geologic-User Based Analysis

Discrimination of geologic targets on synthetic- aperture radar (SAR) images is governed to a large degree by the ground resolution, the image speckle, and the range of contrast on the images. Holding the image contrast constant a survey was made of the effects of ground resolution versus speckle relative to discrimination and interpretability of Earth terrane features. Seasat SAR data of three different test sites were used to simulate thirteen combinations of range resolution, azimuth resolution and speckle (Table 1)