A descalloping technique based on Multi Resolution Analysis for COSMO-SkyMed ScanSAR data

The Scanning Synthetic Aperture Radar (ScanSAR) is a powerful and widely used acquisition mode for Earth observation because of its huge imaging swath and short revisit time. These peculiarities make ScanSAR mode more advantageous of others SAR acquisition modes, in order to provide data suitable for marine applications. Data are obtained by recording backscattered signals from multiple sub-swaths in an altering manner, i.e. ScanSAR disperses the transmitted pulses to several beams by activating each beam intermittently.The particular ScanSAR operating mode can cause an artifact in processed images known as scalloping that appears as thin horizontal bars in range direction over the entire image.In this paper an innovative technique able to remove scalloping artifacts from Multi-Look Ground Detected (MGD) SAR Cosmo-SkyMed (CSK) by means of Wavelet Transform (WT) Multi Resolution Analysis (MRA) is presented. The obtained results show the soundness of such a technique.