scholarly journals SAR interferometry with the RADARSAT Constellation Mission

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
J P Dudley ◽  
S V Samsonov

The RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) is Canada's latest system of C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Earth observation satellites. The system of three satellites, spaced equally in a common orbit, allows for a rapid four-day repeat interval. The RCM has been designed with a selection of stripmap, spotlight, and ScanSAR beam modes which offer varied combinations of spatial resolution and coverage. Using Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) techniques, the growing archive of SAR data gathered by RCM can be used for change detection and ground deformation monitoring for diverse applications in Canada and around the world. In partnership with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO) has developed an automated system for generating standard and advanced deformation products and change detection from SAR data acquired by RCM and RADARSAT-2 satellites using DInSAR processing methodology. Using this system, this paper investigates four key interferometric properties of the RCM system which were not available on the RADARSAT-1 or RADARSAT-2 missions: The impact of the high temporal resolution of the four-day repeat cycle of the RCM on temporal decorrelation trends is tested and fitted against simple temporal decay models. The effect of the normalization and the precision of the radiometric calibration on interferometric spatial coherence is investigated. The performance of the RCM ScanSAR mode for wide area interferometric analysis is tested. The performance of the novel RCM Compact-polarization (CP) mode for interferometric analysis is also investigated.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
J P Dudley ◽  
S V Samsonov

Remote sensing using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers powerful methods for monitoring ground deformation from both natural and anthropogenic sources. Advanced analysis techniques such as Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR), change detection, and Speckle Offset Tracking (SPO) provide sensitive measures of ground movement. With both the RADARSAT-2 and RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) SAR satellites, Canada has access to a significant catalogue of SAR data. To make use of this data, the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO) has developed an automated system for generating standard and advanced deformation products from SAR data using both DInSAR and SPO methods. This document provides a user guide for this automated processing system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 5311-5318
Author(s):  
Zhengquan Hu ◽  
Yu Liu ◽  
Xiaowei Niu ◽  
Guoping Lei

As aerospace technology, computer technology, network communication technology and information technology become more and more perfect, a variety of sensors for measurement and remote sensing are constantly emerging, and the ability to acquire remote sensing data is also continuously enhanced. Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) technology greatly expands the function and application field of imaging radar. Differential InSAR (DInSAR) developed based on InSAR technology has the advantages of high precision and all-weather compared with traditional measurement methods. However, DInSAR-based deformation monitoring is susceptible to spatiotemporal coherence, orbital errors, atmospheric delays, and elevation errors. Since phase noise is the main error of InSAR, to determine the appropriate filtering parameters, an iterative adaptive filtering method for interferogram is proposed. For the limitation of conventional DInSAR, to improve the accuracy of deformation monitoring as much as possible, this paper proposes a deformation modeling based on ridge estimation and regularization as a constraint condition, and introduces a variance component estimation to optimize the deformation results. The simulation experiment of the iterative adaptive filtering method and the deformation modeling proposed in this paper shows that the deformation information extraction method based on differential synthetic aperture radar has high precision and feasibility.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1746
Author(s):  
Salman Ahmadi ◽  
Saeid Homayouni

In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on the active contours model for change detection from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In order to increase the accuracy of the proposed approach, a new operator was introduced to generate a difference image from the before and after change images. Then, a new model of active contours was developed for accurately detecting changed regions from the difference image. The proposed model extracts the changed areas as a target feature from the difference image based on training data from changed and unchanged regions. In this research, we used the Otsu histogram thresholding method to produce the training data automatically. In addition, the training data were updated in the process of minimizing the energy function of the model. To evaluate the accuracy of the model, we applied the proposed method to three benchmark SAR data sets. The proposed model obtains 84.65%, 87.07%, and 96.26% of the Kappa coefficient for Yellow River Estuary, Bern, and Ottawa sample data sets, respectively. These results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to other methods. Another advantage of the proposed model is its high speed in comparison to the conventional methods.


Author(s):  
Ferdinando Nunziata ◽  
Andrea Buono ◽  
Maurizio Migliaccio

Oil spills are adverse events that may be very harmful to ecosystems and food chain. In particular, large sea oil spills are very dramatic occurrence often affecting sea and coastal areas. Therefore the sustainability of oil rig infrastructures and oil transportation via oil tankers are linked to law enforcement based on proper monitoring techniques which are also fundamental to mitigate the impact of such pollution. Within this context, in this study a meaningful showcase is analyzed using remotely sensed measurements collected by the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operated by the COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) constellation. The showcase presented refers to the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil incident that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. It is one of the world's largest incidental oil pollution event that affected a sea area larger than 10,000 km2. In this study we exploit, for the first time, dual co-polarization SAR data collected by the Italian CSK X-band SAR constellation showing the key benefits of HH-VV SAR measurements in observing such a huge oil pollution event, especially in terms of the very dense revisit time offered by the CSK constellation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1899 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes N. Hansen ◽  
Edward T. A. Mitchard ◽  
Stuart King

Synthetic Aperture Radar has a unique potential for continuous forest mapping as it is not affected by cloud cover. While longer wavelengths, such as L-band, are commonly used for forest applications, in this paper we assess the aptitude of C-band Sentinel-1 data for this purpose, for which there is much interest due to its high temporal resolution (five days) and “free, full, and open” data policy. We tested its ability to distinguish forest from non-forest in six study sites, located in Alaska, Colombia, Finland, Florida, Indonesia, and the UK. Using the time series for a full year significantly increases the classification accuracy compared to a single scene (a mean of 85 % compared to 77 % across the study sites for the best classifier). Our results show that we can further improve the mean accuracy to 87 % when only considering the annual mean and standard deviation of co-polarized (VV) and cross-polarized (VH) backscatter. In this case, separation accuracies of up to 93 % (in Finland) are possible, though in the worst case (Alaska), the highest possible accuracy using these variables was 80 % . The best overall performance was observed when using a Support Vector Machine classifier, outperforming random forest, k-Nearest-Neighbors, and Quadratic Discriminant Analysis. We further show that the small information content we found in the phase data is an artifact of terrain slope orientation and has a negligible impact on classifier performance. We conclude that for the purposes of forest mapping the smaller file size and easier to process GRD products are sufficient, unless the SLC products are used to compute the temporal coherence which was not tested in this study.


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