A Deep Learning Iterative Framework for Sentinel-1 Stripmap Enhancement Based on Azimuth Doppler Decomposition
Quick Take
A self-supervised enhancement framework for Sentinel-1 Stripmap SAR imagery leverages azimuth subaperture decomposition, outperforming MERLIN in PSNR and SSIM metrics. This method enhances image quality while maintaining structural fidelity, making it applicable to various SAR platforms and modes.
Key Points
- Proposed framework uses azimuth subaperture decomposition for image enhancement.
- Outperforms MERLIN in PSNR and SSIM while achieving a trade-off in ENL.
- No external sensors or simulated ground truth required for training.
- Demonstrates operational viability for SAR image enhancement.
- Framework can be extended to other SAR platforms and acquisition modes.
Article Content
From source RSS / original summaryarXiv:2605. 29088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery enables all-weather, day-and-night Earth observation; however, it remains difficult to interpret due to speckle noise and other intrinsic imaging artifacts. Sentinel-1 (S1) constitutes one of the most widely used spaceborne SAR missions, offering systematic global coverage, high temporal resolution, dual-polarization imaging, and free data availability.
Among S1 modes, Stripmap (SM) provides the highest resolution, yet speckle noise and spatial constraints often hinder applications requiring finer spatial detail. This motivates the need for effective image enhancement strategies. In this work, we propose a self-supervised enhancement framework for S1 SM imagery based on azimuth subaperture decomposition.
The method exploits the physical consistency between subaperture reconstructions and the corresponding full-aperture image to generate paired training data without external sensors, simulated ground truth, or multi-temporal stacks. The proposed framework integrates single- and multi-frame learning and incorporates an iterative inference scheme that progressively refines image quality.
Experiments on real S1 SM data show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the widely adopted self-supervised deep learning baseline MERLIN, in terms of PSNR and SSIM, while MERLIN attains higher ENL, highlighting a trade-off between structural fidelity and speckle smoothing. Overall, the results demonstrate that subaperture-based supervision provides a physically grounded, reproducible, and operationally viable approach for SAR image enhancement using S1 data.
It is worth noting that the proposed approach can be extended to other SAR platforms, polarizations, and acquisition modes.
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