SAR image formation enhancement using effective velocity estimation method

Abstract Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) presents powerful tools for grounding mapping and remote sensing applications. Effective velocity is a vital index that controls the quality of SAR image formation. An accurate calculation of effective velocity provides a particular value of azimuth frequency modulated (FM) rate. The resultant azimuth FM rate could be used to produce a focused SAR image with sharp details. In this paper, SAR image formation enhancement is proposed using two guided methods based on precise effective velocity estimation. Firstly, effective velocity is estimated based on Sentinel-1data parameters extracted from selected image raw data. Secondly, an iteration method applies output image contrast, sharpness and entropy measurements to estimate the optimum value of the effective velocity based on the initial velocities calculated in the first method. Results are compared with extracted SAR images ignoring the effect of the effective velocity, to identify the performance of the proposed methods.