• Journal of Space Technology and Applications
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.268-281
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• 2021

Recently, the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been increasingly in demand due to its advantage of being able to observe desired points regardless of time and weather. To utilize SAR data, first of all, many pre-processing such as satellite orbit correction, radiometric calibration, multi-looking, and geocoding are required. For analysis of SAR imagery such as object detection, change detection, and DEM(Digital Elevation Model), additional processings are needed. These pre-processing and additional processes are very complex and require a lot of time and computational resources. In order to handle the SAR images easily, the institutions that use SAR images develop analysis tools and provide users. This paper introduces the function and characteristics of representative SAR imagery analysis tools.

• 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.14 no.1
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• pp.69-82
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• 1998

SAR imagery can overcome the limitations of electro-optical sensor imagery and provide us Information which plays a supplementary role. But it is necessary to remove a variety of geometric errors in SAR imagery. An accurate geometric correction of SAR imagery is not easy task to achieve, though some techniques and theories are introduced. We also have difficulties such as transformation problem between 'International' ellipsoid in Radarsat system and 'Bessel' ellipsoid. Two widely used correction method, one is made by simulated image, and the other by collinearity equation, usually use DEM. In this study, the merits and demerits of geocoding methods respectively and the effective method for Korean terrain were found.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.53 no.6
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• pp.7-16
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• 2011

This study discussed the applicability of satellite SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) imagery with regard to reservoir monitoring, and tried the extraction of reservoir storage from multi-temporal C-band RADARSAT-1 SAR backscattering images of Yedang and Goongpyeong agricultural reservoirs, acquired from May to October 2005. SAR technology has been advanced as a complementary and alternative approach to optical remote sensing and in-situ measurement. Water bodies in SAR imagery represent low brightness induced by low backscattering, and reservoir storage can be derived from the backscatter contrast with the level-area-volume relationship of each reservoir. The threshold segmentation over the routine preprocessing of SAR images such as speckle reduction and low-pass filtering concluded a significant correlation between the SAR-derived reservoir storage and the observation record in spite of the considerable disagreement. The result showed up critical limitations for adopting SAR data to reservoir monitoring as follows: the inappropriate specifications of SAR data, the unreliable rating curve of reservoir, the lack of climatic information such as wind and precipitation, the interruption of inside and neighboring land cover, and so on. Furthermore, better accuracy of SAR-based reservoir monitoring could be expected through different alternatives such as multi-sensor image fusion, water level measurement with altimeters or interferometry, etc.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.667-670
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• 2005

Ground control points(GCPs) can be extracted from SAR data given precise orbit for DTM generation using optic images and other SAR data. In this study, we extract GCPs from ERS SAR data and SRTM DEM. Although it is very difficult to identify GCPs in ERS SAR image, the geometry of optic image and other SAR data are able to be corrected and more precise DTM can be constructed from stereo optic images. Twenty GCPs were obtained from the ERS SAR data with precise Delft orbit information. After the correction was applied, the mean values of planimetric distance errors of the GCPs were 3.7m, 12.1 and -0.8m with standard deviations of 19.9m, 18.1, and 7.8m in geocentric X, Y, and Z coordinates, respectively. The geometries of SPOT stereo pair were corrected by 13 GCPs, and r.m.s. errors were 405m, 705m and 8.6m in northing, easting and height direction, respectively. And the geometries of RADARS AT stereo pair were corrected by 12 GCPs, and r.m.s. errors were 804m, 7.9m and 6.9m in northing, easting and height direction, respectively. DTMs, through a method of area based matching with pyramid images, were generated by SPOT stereo images and RADARS AT stereo images. Comparison between points of the obtained DTMs and points estimated from a national 1 :5,000 digital map was performed. For DTM by SPOT stereo images, the mean values of distance errors in northing, easting and height direction were respectively -7.6m, 9.6m and -3.1m with standard deviations of 9.1m, 12.0m and 9.1m. For DTM by RADARSAT stereo images, the mean values of distance errors in northing, easting and height direction were respectively -7.6m, 9.6m and -3.1m with standard deviations of 9.1m, 12.0m and 9.1m. These results met the accuracy of DTED level 2

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.131-139
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• 2009

The existing vessel monitoring system using the ground surveillance radar has a difficulty in monitoring ships continuously due to the limited range of detecting ships. For resolving this problem, we carry out a research on ship detection which is to be the core technology of vessel monitoring system for ocean monitoring using SAR imagery. There are two different methods of detecting ships in SAR imagery: detection of the ship target itself and detection of the ship wake. In this paper, we mainly focus on algorithms which detect the ship itself, and also present the accuracy test after extracting positional and directional figures of the ships. After rectifying input SAR imagery using polynomial transformation, we use Wiener filter to remove speckle noises. A labeling technique and morphological filtering in conjunction with Otsu's method are used to automatically detect the ships based on the image processing domain. For ground truth data, information from a radar system is used, which allows assessing the accuracy of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method has the high potential in automatically detecting the ships and its positional/directional figures in a fast way.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.355-363
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• 2007

The 3D DWT(The Three Dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform) scheme is potentially regarded as useful one on analyzing both spatial and spectral information. Nevertheless, few researchers have attempted to process or classified remotely sensed images using the 3D DWT. This study aims to apply the 3D DWT to the land cover classification of optical and SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) images. Then, their results are evaluated quantitatively and compared with the results of traditional classification technique. As the experimental results, the 3D DWT shows superior classification results to conventional techniques, especially dealing with the high-resolution imagery and SAR imagery. It is thought that the 3D DWT scheme can be extended to multi-temporal or multi-sensor image classification.

• Spatial Information Research
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.1-13
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• 2001

Nowadays, SAR Interferometry is actively being studied as a new technique in topographic mapping using satellite imagery. It extracts height values using phase information derived by two SAR imageries covering same areas. Unlike when using SPOT imagery, it is not affected by atmospheric conditions and time. So to speak, we can say that SAR Interferometry is flexible in imagery acquisitions and can get height data economically over wide area. So, it is expected that SAR Interferometry will be widely using in GIS applications. But, in some area occurring geometric distortion, height data are misjudged or not extracted depending on phase unwrapping algorithms. IN the case of ERS tandem data, the accuracy of height data was worst in mountain area. It is the because of the short incidence angle resulted in layover effect. Of the phase unwrapping algorithms, path-following was better in height accuracy but could not get data in layover area. In this area, we could get height data using Height Sensitivity. In concludion, we could get DEM that maintained the accuracy of path-following method and have overall data across imagery.

• Korean Journal of Geomatics
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.37-46
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• 2002

Accurate classification of water area is an preliminary step to accurately analyze the flooded area and damages caused by flood. This step is especially useful for monitoring the region where annually repeating flood is a problem. The accurate estimation of flooded area can ultimately be utilized as a primary source of information for the policy decision. Although SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) imagery with its own energy source is sensitive to the water area, its shadow effect similar to the reflectance signature of the water area should be carefully checked before accurate classification. Especially when we want to identify small flood area with mountainous environment, the step for removing shadow effect turns out to be essential in order to accurately classify the water area from the SAR imagery. In this paper, the flood area was classified and monitored using multi-temporal RADARSAT SAR images of Ok-Chun and Bo-Eun located in Chung-Book Province taken in 12th (during the flood) and 19th (after the flood) of August, 1998. We applied several steps of geometric and radiometric calculations to the SAR imagery. First we reduced the speckle noise of two SAR images and then calculated the radar backscattering coefficient $(\sigma^0)$. After that we performed the ortho-rectification via satellite orbit modeling developed in this study using the ephemeris information of the satellite images and ground control points. We also corrected radiometric distortion caused by the terrain relief. Finally, the water area was identified from two images and the flood area is calculated accordingly. The identified flood area is analyzed by overlapping with the existing land use map.

• 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.