Automatic Detection and Characterization of Subsurface Linear Features in Radar Sounder Data Acquired on Icy Areas

Abstract:
Radar sounders are very important instruments that can provide relevant information on the subsurface of icy regions. This holds for both airborne and spaceborne platforms. Nowadays, a large amount of data are available from terrestrial and planetary missions. The development of automatic techniques for the analysis of these data is thus fundamental for a proper data exploitation. In this paper we propose a novel method for the automatic detection of subsurface linear features from radar sounder data acquired in icy areas showing extended layering. The technique estimates the position of linear features with sub-pixel accuracy and measures geometrical and radiometric properties of the detected layers. The effectiveness of the method is confirmed by the results obtained on Shallow Radar radargrams acquired at Mars.