Clutter Detection Using Two-Channel Radar Sounder Data

Surface clutter can corrupt both Earth and planetary Radar Sounder (RS) observations preventing definitive interpretation of subsurface features, which are often the primary interest of geologists and planetary scientists. Clutter is usually detected by manual or automatic techniques that require ancillary information about the topography of the surface. However, this topography information is not always available. In this paper, we propose a novel method for clutter detection that is independent from ancillary information. This method uses a two channel RS system to exploit the cross-channel interferometric phase difference and is made up three main steps: i) feature extraction and theoretical phase difference estimation, ii) RS interferogram formation and iii) comparison of theoretical and real phase difference distributions. The proposed method has been validated on RS data acquired in Greenland.