S-1 GRD Border Noise Removal

S-1 GRD Border Noise Removal

The Sentinel-1 (S-1) Instrument Processing Facility (IPF) is responsible for generating the complete family of Level-1 and Level-2 operation products. The processing of the RAW data into L1 products features number of processing steps leading to artefacts at the image borders.

These processing steps are mainly the azimuth and /range compression and the sampling start time changes handling that is necessary to compensate for the change of earth curvature. The latter is generating a number of leading and trailing “no-value” samples that depends on the data-take length that can be of several minutes. The former creates radiometric artefacts complicating the detection of the “no-value” samples.

These “no-value” pixels are not null but contain very low values which complicates the masking based on thresholding.

This operator implements an algorithm proposed in [1] allowing masking the "no-value" samples efficiently with thresholding method.

[1] Masking "No-value" Pixels on GRD Products generated by the Sentinel-1 ESA IPF, Reference MPC-0243, Issue 1.0, Date 2015, June 25.