• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.361-373
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• 2013

The monitoring of urban area, target detection and building reconstruction have been actively studied and investigated since high resolution X-band SAR images could be acquired by airborne and/or satellite SAR systems. This paper describes an efficient approach to reconstruct artificial structures (e.g. apartment, building and house) in urban area using high resolution X-band SAR images. Building footprint was first extracted from 1:25,000 digital topographic map and then a corner line of building was detected by an automatic detecting algorithm. With SAR amplitude images, an initial building height was calculated by the length of layover estimated using KS-test (Kolmogorov-Smirnov test) from the corner line. The interferometric SAR phases were simulated depending on SAR geometry and changable building heights ranging from -10 m to +10 m of the initial building height. With an interferogram from real SAR data set, the simulation results were compared using the method of the phase consistency. One of results can be finally defined as the reconstructed building height. The developed algorithm was applied to repeat-pass TerraSAR-X spotlight mode data set over an apartment complex in Daejeon city, Korea. The final building heights were validated against reference heights extracted from LiDAR DSM, with an RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) of about 1~2m.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.30 no.6_1
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• pp.519-528
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• 2012

It was pointed out that the terrain distortion of SAR image is even worse than that of optical image although SAR imagery has the advantages of being independent of solar illumination and weather conditions. It is thus necessary to correct terrain distortion in SAR image for various application areas to integrate SAR and optical image information. There has to be a clear evaluation of terrain correction of high resolution SAR image according to the quality of DEM because the DEM of study site is generally used in the process of terrain correction. To achieve this issue, this paper compared the effects of quality of Digital Elevation Model(DEM) in the process of terrain correction of high resolution SAR images, using the DEM produced from 1:5000 topographic contour maps, LiDAR DEM, ASTER GDEM, SRTM DEM. We used TerraSAR-X and Cosmo-SkyMed, as the test data set, which are constructed on the same X-band SAR system as KOMPSAT-5. In order to evaluate quantitatively the correction results, we conducted comparative evaluation with the KOMPSAT-2 ortho image of the same region. The evaluation results showed that the DEM produced from 1:5000 topographic contour maps achieved successful results in the terrain correction of SAR image compared with the other DEM data, and the widely used SRTM DEM data in various applications was not suitable for the terrain correction of high resolution SAR images.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.183-192
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• 2009

SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) is an all-weather imaging radar and is widely used in military and civil application. Especially high-resolution SAR images are very important in military purpose because it can be used at target recognition application. LIG Nex1 developed a SAR system called NexSAR with bandwidth of 600 MHz and resolution of 30 cm to obtain technologies required for high-resolution SAR. To achieve 600 MHz bandwidth of waveform generator, two DDSs are used and its output signals are SSB modulated. And deramp technique is used to reduce the sampling rate of ADC at high resolution mode. NexSAR has stripmap and spotlight modes and its functionality and performances are evaluated through ground and flight tests.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.255-265
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• 2015

Very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery provide valuable information on urban change monitoring due to multi-temporal observation over large areas. Recently, there has been increased interest in the urban change detection technique using VHR Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging system, because it can take images regardless of solar illumination and weather condition. In this paper, we proposed a texture-based urban change detection method using the VHR SAR texture features generated from Gray-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM). In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method, the result was compared, visually and quantitatively, with the result of Non-Coherent Change Detection (NCCD) which is widely used for the change detection of VHR SAR image. The experimental results showed the greater detection accuracy and the visually satisfactory result compared with the NCCD method. In conclusion, the proposed method has shown a great potential for the extraction of urban change information from VHR SAR imagery.

• Journal of Satellite, Information and Communications
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.6-12
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• 2017

Recently, the demand for SAR imaging is growing to monitor natural disasters or military sites to foresee topographic changes, where optical sensing is not easily available. High-resolution SAR images are useful in exploring topography and monitoring artificial land objects in all weather conditions. In this paper,high resolution SAR images acquired from KOMPSAT-5 are exploited for the applications of change detection and classification. In order to detect change areas, amplitude change detection (ACD) and coherence change detection (CCD) algorithms are employed and their performances are compared in practical applications. For enhanced performance, the potential of small scaled change detection is explored by combining multi-temporary SAR images. The k-means and SVM methods are applied for land classifications and their performances are compared by applying to the real spaceborne SAR images.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.181-190
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• 2011

Since the radar satellite missions such as TerraSAR-X and COSMO-SkyMed were launched in 2007, the spatial resolution of spaceborne SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) images reaches about 1 meter at spotlight mode. In 2011, the first Korean SAR satellite, KOMPSAT-5, will be launched, operating at X-band with the highest spatial resolution of 1 m as well. The improved spatial resolution of state-of-the-art SAR sensor suggests expanding InSAR(Interferometric SAR) analysis in urban monitoring. By the way, the shadow and layover phenomena are more prominent in urban areas due to building structure because of inherent side-looking geometry of SAR system. Up to date the most conventional algorithms do not consider the return signals at the frontage of building during InSAR phase and SAR intensity simulation. In this study the new algorithm introducing multi-scattering in layover region is proposed for phase and intensity simulation, which is utilized a precise LIDAR DSM(Digital Surface Model) in urban areas. The InSAR phases simulated by the proposed method are compared with TerraSAR-X spotlight data. As a result, both InSAR phases are well matched, even in layover areas. This study will be applied to urban monitoring using high resolution SAR data, in terms of change detection and displacement monitoring at the scale of building unit.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.475-491
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• 2021

With the recent increase in available high-resolution (< ~1 m) satellite SAR images, the demand for precise registration of SAR images is increasing in various fields including change detection. The registration between high-resolution SAR images acquired in different look angle is difficult due to speckle noise and geometric distortion caused by the characteristics of SAR images. In this study, registration is performed in two stages, coarse and fine, using the x-band SAR data imaged at staring spotlight mode of TerraSAR-X. For the coarse registration, a method combining the adaptive sampling method and SAR-SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) is applied, and three rigid methods (NCC: Normalized Cross Correlation, Phase Congruency-NCC, MI: Mutual Information) and one non-rigid (Gefolki: Geoscience extended Flow Optical Flow Lucas-Kanade Iterative), for the fine registration stage, was performed for performance comparison. The results were compared by using RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) and FSIM (Feature Similarity) index, and all rigid models showed poor results in all image combinations. It is confirmed that the rigid models have a large registration error in the rugged terrain area. As a result of applying the Gefolki algorithm, it was confirmed that the RMSE of Gefolki showed the best result as a 1~3 pixels, and the FSIM index also obtained a higher value than 0.02~0.03 compared to other rigid methods. It was confirmed that the mis-registration due to terrain effect could be sufficiently reduced by the Gefolki algorithm.

• Aerospace Engineering and Technology
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.131-141
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• 2014

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a powerful and well established microwave remote sensing technique which enables high resolution measurements of the Earth surface independent of weather conditions and sunlight illumination. In this study, this paper first summarizes the basic SAR theory and the history of the SAR satellites. The second part of this paper gives an overview of new technologies for future SAR systems. New innovative concepts and technologies for SAR satellites will be digital beamforming, High Resolution Wide Swath (HRWS), Waveform Encoding, Terrain Observation by Progressive Scan (TOPS), and so on. These technologies will play an important role for future spaceborne SAR satellites.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.105-113
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• 2010

SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) has characteristics well-suited for the measurement of geophysical parameters during day and night in all weather conditions. Recently, SAR data with high resolution acquired by satellites became available to the public. In such data, many features and phenomena of geometric structure of man-made objects and natural environments become observable. In this paper, we discuss main considerations including geometric distortion and coregistration for efficient utilization of high resolution SAR images. And, various advanced technologies in SAR application fields are introduced.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.75-86
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• 2012

Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) imaging system is independent of solar illumination and weather conditions; however, SAR image is difficult to interpret as compared with optical images. It has been increased interest in multi-sensor fusion technique which can improve the interpretability of $SAR^{\circ\circ}$ images by fusing the spectral information from multispectral(MS) image. In this paper, a multi-sensor fusion method based on high-frequency extraction process using Fast Fourier Transform(FFT) and outlier elimination process is proposed, which maintain the spectral content of the original MS image while retaining the spatial detail of the high-resolution SAR image. We used TerraSAR-X which is constructed on the same X-band SAR system as KOMPSAT-5 and KOMPSAT-2 MS image as the test data set to evaluate the proposed method. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method, the fusion result was compared visually and quantitatively with the result obtained using existing fusion algorithms. The evaluation results showed that the proposed image fusion method achieved successful results in the fusion of SAR and MS image compared with the existing fusion algorithms.