Simultaneous Screening and Detection of RFI From Massive SAR Images: A Case Study on European Sentinel-1

Abstract

Currently, the spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system transmits a great deal of data to the ground processing station and generates massive images daily, only a tiny fraction of which contains radio frequency interference (RFI). However, most of the existing RFI detection methods are based on the prior conditions in which the known image contains interference. In fact, it is difficult to learn whether SAR images contain RFIs without prescreening, so it is of great significance to the rapid and real-time screening and detection of RFI in SAR images. This paper proposes a method to screen and detect RFI from massive SAR images simultaneously. 1) We construct an approximate RFI-free background image by using the preprocessed time-series SAR images acquired in the past. 2) We generate difference images based on the image change detection method and analyze them by using an adaptive threshold, then calculate the entropy of all difference images to complete the preliminary screening of the RFI-containing images. 3) According to the preliminary results, we remove the RFI-containing parts; after reconstructing the background, we repeat step 2 with the images to be detected and obtain the final screening and detection results. Massive experimental results based on Sentinel-1 images validate the performance of the proposed method.