SAR beyond the spatial resolution limit

In this paper, the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image speckle over marine scenes is modelled and tested over Sentinel-1 single-look complex dual-polarimetric measurements at variance of wind speed. The aim of the study is to demonstrate that SAR speckle is informative once a proper physical/statistical speckle model is developed. The first-order statistical distribution of the speckle is analyzed by means of the Normalized Intensity Moments (NIMs) under three different cases: low, moderate and high wind conditions.Experimental results show that over VV-polarized images the K-distribution model works very well under low-to-moderate wind regime, while at increasing wind speed a new speckle model has to be developed and considered since a very different scattering mechanism applies over sea surface.