Francescopaolo Sica, scholarship holder at IREA, was awarded the Best Student Paper Award of SPIE Remote Sensing Conference (Amsterdam, 22-25 Sept. 2014) in the area "SAR Image Analysis, Modeling, and Techniques". The paper "Benefits of blind speckle decorrelation for InSAR processing", by F. Sica, L. Alparone, F. Argenti, G. Fornaro, A. Lapini, D. Reale, is the result of the collaboration between IREA and the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Florence.

The work deals with the problem of limiting the effects of noise from highly reflective targets, typical of the signals acquired from high resolution sensors in X-band as those of the COSMO SKYMED constellation, for the generation of accurate products of SAR interferometry. The latter is a technique that has important implications for the generation of digital elevation maps at a global scale and in the monitoring of deformations associated with natural hazards and security of buildings and infrastructures.