Interference Suppression in Synthesized SAR Images

Radio interferences are becoming more and more an important source for image degradation in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. Especially at longer wavelengths, interferences are often very strong, and their suppression is required during data processing. However, at shorter wavelengths, interferences are often not obvious in the image amplitude, and filtering is not performed in an operational way. Nevertheless, interferences might significantly degrade the image phase, and the estimation of sensitive parameters like interferometric coherence or polarimetric descriptors becomes imprecise. Interference suppression is usually performed on the raw data, which are in most cases not available to the end-user. In this letter, a new interference suppression method for focused SAR images is proposed. Its performance is tested on interferometric repeat-pass data acquired by the German Aerospace Agency's experimental SAR system (E-SAR) at L-band.