SAR prescreener enhancement through multi-look processing

The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has recently examined single-polarity, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data collected in spotlight mode at X band as part of an effort to identify land mines in radar imagery. This data set consists of several single-polarization, extremely high-resolution, spotlight-mode SAR images from multiple passes over a common target area that includes various reference reflectors as well as the landmines. In earlier investigations at Ku band, we observed that a multi-look averaging scheme could enhance the contrast between mines and background clutter. In the most recent investigation, we hypothesize that a similar behavior would be present in the X band imagery, and we demonstrate how the enhanced contrast from multi-look processing leads to improved prescreener performance under certain conditions. Results are presented in the form of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for different several different prescreener parameter settings.