On the spatial resolution enhancement of microwave radiometer data in Banach spaces

A reconstruction technique, mathematically based on a generalization of the gradient method in Banach spaces, is first proposed to enhance the spatial resolution of radiometer earth observation (EO) measurements. This approach allows reducing the over-smoothing effects and the oscillations that are often present in standard Hilbert-spaces procedures without any drawback on the numerical complexity. Experiments undertaken on a data set consisting of both simulated and actual two-dimensional Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) radiometer measurements show the accuracy and the effectiveness of the proposed technique. A typical radiometer scene is processed in few minutes by a standard PC processor. Further, since the proposed approach is iterative the processing time increases slowly with the problem’s size.