Decorrelating Clutter Statistics for Long Integration Time SAR Imaging

It is presented an experiment aimed to assess and eventually complement the Billingsley Internal Clutter Motion (ICM) model for long integration time SAR imaging. Exploiting a real-aperture rotating antenna Ground-Based RADAR, observations of rural areas in different periods of the year have been performed. The collected data, obtained from two different acquisition modes, have been processed to obtain short-term and long-term clutter de-correlation analysis. The results obtained revealed interesting aspects of the phenomenon. In particular, it can be observed that the process is nonstationary with time, say minutes to hours, and that DC/AC ratio follows a day/night characteristic. Moreover, the results showed values of the AC component decay rate β higher than the foreseen ones in the considered spectral interval, which is quite below the one analyzed in the Billingsley experiment.