Estimating Noise Floor in Sentinel-1 Images With Linear Programming and Least Squares
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sentinel-1 is a synthetic aperture radar platform that provides free and open-source images of the Earth. A product type of Sentinel-1 is ground range detected (GRD), which records intensity while discarding phase information from the radar backscatter. Especially in cross-polarized GRD images, there are noticeable intensity changes throughout the image that are caused by amplifying the noise floor of the signal, which varies due to the nonuniform radiation pattern of the satellite’s antenna. While Sentinel-1 has instrument processing facility (IPF) software to estimate the noise floor, even in the newer versions (3.1 or above) of the IPF software there are still instances where the estimates provided do not fit the actual noise floor in the image, which is particularly noticeable in transitions between adjacent subswaths. In this work, we propose a method that reduces the impact of the varying noise-floor throughout the image. The method models the intensity of the noise floor to be a power function of the radiation pattern power. The method divides the swath into several sections depending on the location of the local minimum and maximum of the radiation pattern power with respect to the range. The parameter estimation is portrayed as a geometric programming problem that is transformed into a linear programming problem by logarithmic transformation. Affine offsets are computed for each subswath by a weighted least squares approach. Vast improvement is found on extra-wide (EW) and interferometric wide (IW) Sentinel-1 modes over cross-polarized images. Code implementation is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/PeterQLee/sentinel1_denoise_rs</uri> .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".