A complex spectrum based SAR image resampling method with restricted target sidelobes and statistics preservation

The aim of this work is to present a resampling scheme for SAR images that preserves spatial resolution and produces statistically accurate images at the same time. Indeed, SAR images are, for reasons due to their acquisition process, well sampled signals according to the Shannon sampling theory. In the presence of strong responses, that we will refer to as targets, a sinc-like function centered at the target is smeared over the entire image and is particularly visible in the range of tens of pixels surrounding the target. To mitigate this phenomenon, the usual solution is to apply an apodization window in the Fourier domain so as to change the cardinal sine impulse response into a much rapidly decaying one. This approach has two major drawbacks. It reduces the resolution of the image and introduces inaccurate statistical dependency between pixels. We propose to resample the image in an adaptive and robust way so that the target smear is canceled and the new sampled image is completely faithful to the underlying signal.