Abstract
Nowadays, a worldwide database containing the historical and reliable data concerning the water surface speed of rivers is not available and would be highly desirable. In order to meet this requirement, the present work is aimed at the design of an estimation procedure for water flow velocity by means of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. The main technical aspect of the proposed procedure is that an along-track geometry is synthesized using a single antenna and a single image. This is achieved by exploiting a multichromatic analysis in the Doppler domain. The application of this approach allows us to obtain along-track interferometry equivalent virtual baselines much lower than the equivalent baseline corresponding to the decorrelation time of raw data preserving data coherence. The performance analysis, conducted on live airborne full-polarimetric SAR data, highlights the effectiveness of the proposed approach in providing reliable river surface velocity estimates without the need of multiple passes on the observed scene.
Highlights
A LONG-TRACK interferometry (ATI) is a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technique which allows for the combination of two or more SAR images of the same scene
An estimate of the LOS velocity of targets can be obtained by estimating the interferogram between the master and the slave Doppler subapertures and the estimation procedure relies on the fact that the phase difference is proportional to the ATI spatial baseline where λ is the operating wavelength, B is the along-track spatial baseline, v is the radar velocity, and u is the LOS speed component of the targets
The analysis is aimed at showing that uninhabited aerial vehicle synthetic aperture radar (UAVSAR) data spectrum is suitable for multichromatic analysis (MCA)-ATI
Summary
A LONG-TRACK interferometry (ATI) is a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technique which allows for the combination of two or more SAR images of the same scene. This feature can be suitably exploited to estimate the surface velocity of water masses In this context, the classical dual-sensor ATI geometric configuration has been first proposed in [1] where the authors describe a new method to measure sea surface currents. In [6], an analysis of the gradient-induced distortions in the surface current estimates generated by ATI-SAR systems using an airborne sensor was provided. Other interesting works related to the application of ATI and, generally speaking, of InSAR for the estimation of heights/velocities of components belonging to moving objects in the observed scene as rivers, vegetation, maritime targets, or infrastructures can be found in [14]–[31]. A novel procedure based on azimuth multichromatic analysis (MCA) and ATI is devised to estimate rivers’ surface water-flow velocities exploiting only one SAR image. The last section concludes the article and introduces future research in the area
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