A novel approach to the automatic detection of subsurface features in planetary radar sounder signals

Nowadays, planetary radar sounding missions operating at Mars are providing a huge amount of data which are mostly analyzed by means of manual investigations. The development of techniques for the automatic extraction of information from radar sounder data is thus a crucial issue for a proper data exploitation from the scientific community. As an important step to the definition of automatic methods that can be implemented in a more general framework for the analysis of radar sounder data, in this paper we present a study of the statistical properties of radar sounder signals. The statistical distributions of the amplitude of the samples related to different subsurface targets are analyzed in order to define a suitable fitting model. Exploiting the results of such a study, we also propose a novel automatic technique capable to extract the deepest scattering area visible in the radargrams. The basal scattering area is composed using an advanced region-growing approach properly defined f...