Focused Synthetic Aperture Radar Processing of Ice-Sounding Data Collected Over the East Antarctic Ice Sheet via the Modified Range Migration Algorithm Using Curvelets

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to address the speckle noise problem in imaging of ice sheets. It is a wave-equation-based ice-sounding imaging method using curvelets as building blocks of ice-sounding data, which successfully images the topography of ice sheets. First, theory analysis has been carried on to the proposed algorithm. Then, we give the specific steps to implement this algorithm. Finally, we apply this algorithm to the simulation point targets and High-Resolution Ice-Sounding Radar data to prove its validity of imaging of ice sheets. Furthermore, compared with five previous methods in two major aspects—the power of clutter reduction and the equivalent number of looks—the proposed algorithm reduces the speckle noise during the imaging processing without degrading the ability in clutter reduction.