Title:  P3397 Standard for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Image Quality Metrics

Scope:  This standard establishes performance metrics to assess the quality of image outputs from different airborne and space-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems created using various algorithms.  The system components that determine image quality include the raw collected data and the back-end processing algorithms.

This standard provides:

• A list of quantitative metrics that can be used to assess the quality of airborne and space-based SAR images.  These metrics include peak signal-to-noise-ratio, integrated sidelobe level, speckle level, signal-to-clutter ratio, ambiguity signal ratio (ASR), noise equivalent sigma zero (NESZ), and feature contrast,
• An analysis of the impact of different SAR geometries and imaging modalities on image quality,
• An analysis of the impact of different focusing and autofocusing methods, computational metrics, different waveform modulations, platform position uncertainty, and quantization errors on image quality,
• Uncertainties and confidence intervals for measured quantities that can be used to assess the quality of calibration routines.