Before visually interpreting and analyzing a radar image, there are several procedures which would be useful to perform, including:

• Converting the slant-range image to the ground-range plane display. This will remove the effects of slant-range scale distortion so that features appear in their proper relative size across the entire swath and distances on the ground are represented correctly.
• Correcting for antenna pattern. This will provide a uniform average brightness of image tone making visual interpretation and comparison of feature responses at different ranges easier.
• Reducing the effects of speckle to some degree. Unless there is a need for detailed analysis of very small features (i.e. less than a few pixels in size), speckle reduction will reduce the "grainy" appearance of the image and make general image interpretation simpler.
• Scaling of the dynamic range in the image to a maximum of 8-bits (256 grey levels). Because of the limitations of most desktop computer systems, as well as of the human eye in discriminating brightness levels, any more grey levels would not be useful.

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