Efficiently dealing with the variety of sar data formats

Abstract

SAR data from airborne ans spaceborne platforms is delivered to users in a variety of formats. Each system has its own format, and each data product from each processing facility also has product-specific format differences. Add to this thathe format and data itself can be modified over the lifetime of the system and users are understandably overwhelmed. Many analysts avoid this issue by using one or a few well-known datasets. But then using something requires a major investment in time and resources before it can be used effectively. In order to tackle this problem head-on, we are developing an open-source software framework that enables the entire remote sensing community to contribute to the solution of this problem. In particular, the framework provides a set of standard tools for development of software that can then be used to ingest any format of remotely-sensed data. Once ingested, this data, including a standard set of metadata, can then be used in subsequent processing without writing sensor-specific processing codes. The framework tools that are being developed to accomplish this are detailed, along with some first successes in writing “ingesters” for some of the popular SAR datasets.