• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.801-810
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• 2018

Ship monitoring using satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images consists of ship detection, ship discrimination, and ship classification. A large number of methods have been proposed to improve the detection and discrimination capabilities, while only a few studies exist for ship classification. Thus, many studies for the ship classification are needed to construct ship monitoring system having high performance. Note that constructing database (DB), which contains both SAR images and labels of various ships, is important for research on the ship classification. In the airborne SAR classification, many methods have been developed using moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) DB. However, there has been no publicly available DB for research on the ship classification using satellite SAR images. Recently, Shanghai Key Laboratory has constructed OpenSARShip DB using both SAR images of various ships generated from Sentinel-1 satellite of European Space Agency (ESA) and automatic identification system (AIS) information. Thus, the applicability of OpenSARShip DB for ship classification should be investigated by using the concepts of airborne SAR classification which have shown high performances. In this study, ship classification using satellite SAR images are conducted by applying the concepts of airborne SAR classification to OpenSARShip DB, and then the applicability of OpenSARShip DB is investigated by analyzing the classification performances.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.153-174
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• 2006

The purpose of this paper is to establish the category of SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) systems, technologies and application fields, thus to provide the world-wide trend in SAR research and development activities by analysing SAR-related journal papers. This paper presents an analysis result of SAR-related journal papers published from the late 1960s to early 2005. Abstracts and indices of 2665 peer-reviewed, English journal papers published in 243 journals were collected from the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts and classified into the categories according to the system, technique, and application field. Statistics on each category were provided so that one can understand the historical and on-going development in SAR systems, techniques, and a variety of application fields such as land, ocean, cryosphere and atmosphere. This statistical analysis data would be a valuable guideline to establish a future SAR system application and satellite manoeuvering policy in Korea.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.401-404
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• 2004

SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) signal data need a focusing procedure to make the information available to the user. In recent SAR systems, various sensing modes and mission operations are applied to acquire high-resolution SAR images. Therefore, in order to develop generalized focusing software for multi-satellites, a regularized parameter configuration that sufficiently represents sensor and platform characteristics of the SAR system is required. The objective of this paper is to introduce the consideration of parameter definition for developing a generalized SAR processor and to discuss the flexibility and extensibility of defined parameters. The proposed parameter configuration can be applied to a SAR processor. Experiments based on real data will show the suitability of the suggested processing parameters.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.253-256
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• 2005

The use of satellite remote sensing in maritime safety and security can aid in the detection of illegal fishing activities and provide more efficient use of limited aircraft or patrol craft resources. In the area of vessel traffic monitoring for commercial vessels, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) which use the ground-based radar system have some difficulties in detecting moving ships due to the limited detection range. A virtual vessel traffic control system is introduced to contribute to prevent a marine accident such as collision and stranding from happening. Existing VTS has its limit. The virtual vessel traffic control system consists of both data acquisition by satellite remote sensing and a simulation of traffic environment stress based on the satellite data, remotely sensed data. And it could be used to provide timely and detailed information about the marine safety, including the location, speed and direction of ships, and help us operate vessels safely and efficiently. If environmental stress values are simulated for the ship information derived from satellite data, proper actions can be taken to prevent accidents. Since optical sensor has a high spatial resolution, JERS satellite data are used to track ships and extract their information. We present an algorithm of automatic identification of ship size and velocity. This paper lastly introduce the field testing results of ship detection by RADARSAT SAR imagery, and propose a new approach for a Vessel Monitoring System(VMS), including VTS, and SAR combination service.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.47-60
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• 2017

The permafrost active layer plays an important role in permafrost dynamics. Ecological patterns, processes, and water and ice contents in the active layer are spatially and temporally complex depending on landscape heterogeneity and local-scale variations in hydrological processes. Although there has been emerging interest in the application of optical remote sensing techniques to permafrost environments, optical sensors are significantly limited in accessing information on near surface geo-cryological conditions. The primary objective of this study was to investigate capability of L-band SAR data for monitoring spatio-temporal variability of permafrost ecosystems and underlying soil conditions. This study exploits information from different polarimetric SAR observables in relation to permafrost environmental conditions. Experimental results show that each polarimetric radar observable conveys different information on permafrost environments. In the case of the dual-pol mode, the radar observables consist of two backscattering powers and one correlation coefficient between polarimetric channels. Among them, the dual-pol scattering powers are highly sensitive to freeze/thaw transition and can discriminate grasslands or ponds in thermokarst area from other permafrost ecosystems. However, it is difficult to identify the ground conditions with dual-pol observables. Additional backscattering powers and correlation coefficients obtained from quad-pol mode help understanding seasonal variations ofradar scattering and assessing geo-cryological information on soil layers. In particular, co-pol coherences atHV-basis and circular-basis were found to be very usefultools for mapping and monitoring near surface soil properties.

• The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.32-39
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• 2013

Although space-borne satellites are useful in obtaining information all around the world, they cannot observe at a suitable time and place. In order to overcome these limitations, an airborne remote sensing system was developed in this study. It is composed of a SAR sensor and a thermal infrared sensor. Additionally GPS, IMU, and thermometer/hygrometer were attached to the plane for radiometric and geometric calibration. The brightness of SAR image varies depending on surface roughness, and capillary waves on the sea surface, which are easily generated by sea winds, induce the surface roughness. Thus, sea surface wind can be estimated using the relationship between quantified SAR backscattering coefficient and the sea surface wind. On the other hand, thermal infrared sensor is sensitive to measure object's temperature. Sea surface temperature is obtained from the thermal infrared sensor after correcting the atmospheric effects which are located between sea surface and the sensor. Using these two remote sensing sensors mounted on airplane, four test flights were carried out along the west coast of Korea. The obtained SAR and thermal infrared images have shown that these images were useful enough to monitor coastal environment and estimate marine meteorology data.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.227-244
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• 2015

Synthetic Aperture Radar is able to provide images of wide coverage in day, night, and all-weather conditions. Recently, as the SAR image resolution improves up to the sub-meter level, their applications are rapidly expanding accordingly. Especially there is a growing interest in the use of geographic information of high resolution SAR images and the change detection will be one of the most important technique for their applications. In this paper, an automatic threshold tracking and change detection algorithm is proposed applicable to high-resolution SAR images. To detect changes within SAR image, a reference image is generated using log-ratio operator and its amplitude distribution is estimated through K-S test. Assuming SAR image has a non-gaussian amplitude distribution, a generalized thresholding technique is applied using Kittler and Illingworth minimum-error estimation. Also, MoLC parametric estimation method is adopted to improve the algorithm performance on rough ground target. The implemented algorithm is tested and verified on the simulated SAR raw data. Then, it is applied to the spaceborne high-resolution SAR images taken by Cosmo-Skymed and KOMPSAT-5 and the performances are analyzed and compared.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.89-95
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• 2017

Ship detection in synthetic aperture radar(SAR)imagery has long been an active research topic and has many applications. In this paper,we propose an efficient method for detecting ships from SAR imagery using filtering. This method exploits ship masking using a median filter that considers maximum ship sizes and detects ships from the reference image, to which a Non-Local means (NL-means) filter is applied for speckle de-noising and a differential image created from the difference between the reference image and the median filtered image. As the pixels of the ship in the SAR imagery have sufficiently higher values than the surrounding sea, the ship detection process is composed primarily of filtering based on this characteristic. The performance test for this method is validated using KOMPSAT-5 (Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite-5) SAR imagery. According to the accuracy assessment, the overall accuracy of the region that does not include land is 76.79%, and user accuracy is 71.31%. It is demonstrated that the proposed detection method is suitable to detect ships in SAR imagery and enables us to detect ships more easily and efficiently.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.539-550
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• 2016

Detection of water bodies in land surface is an essential part of disaster monitoring, such as flood, storm surge, and tsunami, and plays an important role in analyzing spatial and temporal variation of water cycle. In this study, a quantitative comparison of different thresholding-based methods for water body detection and their applicability to Kompsat-5 SAR data were presented. In addition, the effect of speckle filtering on the detection result was analyzed. Furthermore, the variations of threshold values by the proportion of the water body area in the whole image were quantitatively evaluated. In order to improve the binary classification performance, a new water body detection algorithm based on the bimodality test and the majority filtering is presented.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.17-24
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• 2018

Grounding line of a glacier or ice shelf where ice bottom meets the ocean is sensitive to changes in the polar environment. Recent rapid changes of grounding lines have been observed especially in southwestern Antarctica due to global warming. In this study, ERS-1/2 and Sentinel-1A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image were interferometrically acquired in 1996 and 2015, respectively, to monitor the movement of the grounding line in the western part of Ronne Ice Shelf near the Antarctic peninsula. Double-Differential Interferometric SAR (DDInSAR) technique was applied to remove gravitational flow signal to detect grounding line from the interferometric phase due to the vertical displacement of the tide. The result showed that ERS-1/2 grounding lines are almost consistent with those from Rignot et al. (2011) which used the similar dataset, confirming the credibility of the data processing. The comparison of ERS-1/2 and Sentinle-1A DDInSAR images showed a grounding line retreat of $1.0{\pm}0.1km$ from 1996 to 2015. It is also proved that the grounding lines based on the 2004 MODIS Mosaic of Antarctica (MOA) images and digital elevation model searching for ice plain near coastal area (Scambos et al., 2017), is not accurate enough especially where there is a ice plain with no tidal motion.