Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar Images Research Articles

A Case Study on Image Co-Registration of Hyper Spectral and Dual (L & S) Band SAR Data and Ore Findings Over Zewar Mines, India

The technique of superimposing two or more photographs in a way that ensures that for each image, the same pixel corresponds to the same location of the target scene is known as image coregistration It is a crucial stage in the picture enhancement process for satellite images. Different frequency bands store feature. Image fusion makes it possible to superimpose co-registered pictures taken by several sensors to get a superior image incorporating elements from both sources. On many match patches that are evenly dispersed over the two scenes, we estimate pixel offsets between possibly coherent picture pairings as image coregistration allows a more detailed single image to be obtained than many photos with distinct attributes. This study presents existing various fusion methods for ASAR (Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar) images in the S-band and L-band to interpret urban, forestry, and agricultural areas. AVIRIS hyper spectral data also shows mining possibilities on ore of region. Hence, the seeking of ore region, and coregistration using fusion facilitates the remote sensing architecture next to drones.

Studies on High-Resolution Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Formation with Pseudo-Random Agility of Interpulse Waveform Parameters

By means of alteration of the transmitted linear frequency modulation (LFM) signal waveform parameters, such as pulse width or chirp rate, initial phase, pulse repetition interval (PRI), and chirp rate polarity at every position of synthetic apertures, the pseudo-random agility technology of interpulse waveform parameters in airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) actively increases the complexity and uncertainty of radar waveforms. This technology confuses jamming interception receivers, thus improving its anti-interference ability for active coherent jamming, which is one of the main research interests of airborne SAR technology. But the pseudo-random agility technology for interpulse waveform parameters faces certain challenges of large computation and complex system design, which need to be further studied and solved. To address these issues, a processing scheme of high-resolution SAR image formation which is appropriate for agile interpulse waveform parameters is proposed in this paper. This method can deal with multiple agile parameters, not only single ones as in most existing literature. Its computation load is nearly comparable to that of traditional SAR image formation with constant waveform parameters. The high-resolution SAR imaging results obtained by processing SAR raw data with agile interpulse waveform parameters demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, real SAR images with resolutions of 0.5 m and 0.15 m, which are rarely found in the public literature, are shown under the circumstance of randomly changing the transmitted wideband LFM signal pulse parameters one by one.

Research on simulation method for nonlinear effects of airborne SAR electromagnetic interference

In order to simulate the nonlinear interference effect of high-power electromagnetic signals on airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging, the walk–stop geometric modeling of airborne SAR was established, and the range time-domain pulse coherence method was used to simulate SAR echo. By establishing a SAR receiver RF channel model, the interference mechanism of high-power electromagnetic signals is combined on RF front-end devices, the nonlinear effects on the echo signal when high-power electromagnetic signals enter the receiver are simulated, and finally the range Doppler algorithm is used to image the echo signal and the interference signal. A method for evaluating the interference effect of high-power electromagnetic signals on airborne SAR imaging using the correlation coefficient of images was proposed. The results showed that the change in the correlation coefficient of images before and after interference relative to the interference signal ratio was consistent with the image interference effect. The correlation coefficient showed a stepped trend with the change in the interference signal ratio, and there was a saturation effect after the interference effect reached a certain level.

A Modified Range Doppler Algorithm for High-Squint SAR Data Imaging

The high-squint airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has the ability to detect the target area flexibly, and the detection swath is significantly increased compared with the side-looking SAR system. Therefore, it is of great significance to carry out research on high-precision imaging methods for high-squint airborne SAR. However, the high-squint SAR echoes have large Range Cell Migration (RCM), resulting in severe range–azimuth coupling and strong spatial variation. In this paper, a Modified Range Doppler Algorithm (MRDA) is proposed to cope with these effects introduced by the significant RCM in high-squint airborne SAR imaging. The bulk compensation preprocessing is first adopted to remove the considerable RCM and severe cross-coupling in a two-dimensional frequency domain. Then, Non-Linear Chirp Scaling (NLCS) in the range direction is utilized to equalize the range-variant chirp rate caused by the residual RCM and coupling and, therefore, the consistent range phase compensation can be fulfilled in range frequency domain. The modified correlation processing is executed to compensate the residual Doppler phase modulation, the residual RCM and the range-variant cubic phase modulation, which guarantees the characteristics of high efficiency and high precision. The simulations have demonstrated that the MRDA can focus the SAR echoes with large squint angles more effectively than the algorithms based on the Linear Range Walk Correction (LRWC) method.

Cross-scene target detection based on feature adaptation and uncertainty-aware pseudo-label learning for high resolution SAR images

The characteristics of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are easily affected by factors such as sensor parameters, imaging scenes, etc., which may lead to data distributional discrepancies between the ideal training phase and the practical application phase, resulting in generalization performance degradation of deep learning based detectors in practice. In this paper, an accurate and fast domain adaptive detection method is proposed to address the performance degradation problem of cross-scene detection without requiring additional manual annotations. The cross-scene detection performance is gradually improved by confidence-induced unsupervised feature adaptation (CUFA) and uncertainty-aware adaptive pseudo-label learning (UAPL). In CUFA, image-level and instance-level feature adaptation are progressively implemented to bridge the distribution discrepancies between the source and the target domain in the latent feature space. Then, UAPL is performed to adaptively introduce accurate and stable supervisions of target domain according to the learning status of the detector, avoiding error accumulations and further improving the cross-scene target detection performance. The proposed cross-scene detection method is validated on airborne and spaceborne SAR image datasets of different imaging scenes. The experimental results show that by combining both CUFA and UAPL, compared with the second-best comparison method, the proposed method significantly improves the cross-scene target detection performance in SAR images (at least + 6.5% AP50 and F1 in miniSAR and FARAD cross-scene tasks, and at least + 7.5% AP50 and F1 in Gaofen-3 and Sentinel-1 cross-scene tasks), which facilitates application of the deep learning based detectors in the realistic scenarios.

Guidance-Aided Triple-Adaptive Frost Filter for Speckle Suppression in the Synthetic Aperture Radar Image

Speckle noise exists inherently in the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image. Its multiplicative property leads to lots of difficulties in SAR image processing. A novel guidance-aided triple-adaptive Frost filter is proposed in this paper, which has potential for real-time processing platforms. Firstly, a scale-adaptive sliding window sizing method is adopted to determine the neighborhood ranges for every point in the image. All the subsequent processing is based on it. Then, an adaptive calculation for the tuning factor in the Frost filter is embedded into the proposed method. Lastly, the feature information apertured from the original image is used to provide guidance for edge recovery automatically, which guarantees the satisfactory ability for feature preservation. Thus, a novel improved Frost filter is proposed with triple adaptabilities. Both the positioning accuracy and response sensitivity of the scale-adaptive sliding window sizing method are verified first. The superiority of the adaptive tuning factor combined with the scale-adaptive sliding window is confirmed by two comparison experiments. At last, the results of speckle suppression experiments on the synthetic images and two natural airborne SAR images present a better performance than other methods.

Suppressive Interference Suppression for Airborne SAR Using BSS for Singular Value and Eigenvalue Decomposition Based on Information Entropy

Suppressive interference is a common interference signal for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that can seriously affect the target identification and imaging results of SAR. This paper proposes a method for suppressing suppressive jamming using blind source separation (BSS) for singular value and eigenvalue decomposition based on information entropy. First, we developed an airborne SAR imaging geometry model and a suppressive interference signal mixing model. Next, we perform blind signal separation of the interfered mixed signal by means of BSS based on singular value and eigenvalue decomposition. Then, we image the different signals we have extracted. Finally, we extract the features of the image domain for the separated signals and set the information entropy threshold by the difference of information entropy to identify the jamming signal and the source signal and obtain the source signal. This method uses eigenvalue and singular value decomposition for BSS and extracts the image domain features of the signal after BSS by information entropy and identifies the source signal by information entropy thresholding. This method compensates for the uncertainty in the decomposition of the signal by means of BSS. The signal loss is minimal and the similarity of the separated signal and the original signal is very high. Simulated and measured data demonstrate the feasibility of this algorithm.

SAR‐IRGF: A novel improved rolling guidance filter for the synthetic aperture radar image

Inspired by the framework of the rolling guidance filter (RGF), a novel improved RGF for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed in this letter, named SAR-IRGF. Based on the model of additive noise, the RGF has the complete control of detailed smoothing under a scale measure for optical images. However, the speckle is well known as a multiplicative noise, which invalidates the RGF for SAR images. In this letter, an appropriate edge guidance is utilized to optimize the RGF for SAR image denoising. Compared with the original version, better convergence is achieved. Experimental results on natural Ku-band airborne SAR images show that the proposed SAR-IRGF reduces more speckle while sharpening the edges effectively. Simultaneously, the SAR-IRGF demonstrates a significant nearly 5.5-fold improvement than RGF in the equivalent number of looks (ENL).

Vessel detection via multi-order saliency-based fuzzy fusion of spaceborne and airborne SAR images

This study focuses on vessel target detection by fusing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing images collaboratively collected from spaceborne and airborne platforms. Accurate vessel detection is difficult in the presence of inshore interferences and in the case of structured and shaped targets. In this study, we have proposed a new method for the fusion of spaceborne and airborne SAR images based on multi-order superpixel-level saliency and fuzzy logic (MSSFL). We first generated a new global regional contrast map (GRCM) by exploiting the multi-order superpixel-level saliency (MSS). In GRCMs, the vessel targets are well restored, and the background is suppressed. Next, a new fuzzy logic approach based on regional features is presented to fuse the MSS information provided by the GRCMs of the spaceborne and airborne SAR images. This regional feature-based fuzzy fusion can further enhance the vessel target regions and filter out the inshore interference regions. Experimental results using the SAR images of Gaofen-3 satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle show that the proposed MSSFL method yields a higher target-to-clutter ratio of fused images and improved detection performance, compared with the commonly utilized image fusion approaches and the classical detection algorithms solely using spaceborne or airborne SAR images.

A robust statistic‐aided edge detector for SAR images based on RUSTICO

Speckle noise exists inherently due to the special imaging mechanism of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which is a challenge for edge extraction. The traditional methods failed to make full use of statistical characteristics of SAR images to detect the edges, which results in the loss of weak edges. To address this issue, combined with the robust inhibition-augmented curvilinear operator, this letter proposes a novel edge detector based on the ratio of local statistics (ROLSS) for SAR images. In this letter, the proposed detector achieves the balance between edge resolution and speckle suppression through the proposed intensity calculation method. By taking advantage of image statistic characteristics, the proposed ROLSS edge detector can draw complete continuous edges of many shapes areas and textures without any post-processing, such as edge thinning, extension, and so on. Experiment results show that the proposed detector yields more accurate edge maps with fewer false and missed pixels, and it holds robustness both in the speckle-polluted simulated image and the real X-band airborne SAR image.

Three Dimension Airborne SAR Imaging of Rotational Target With Single Antenna and Performance Analysis

For the target with 3-D rotation, the 3-D synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is very important for the feature extraction and classification. To solve this issue, a novel 3-D imaging algorithm through the airborne SAR system with a single antenna is proposed in this article, which has great advantages for the simplification of system structure compared with the traditional interferometric system. The proposed 3-D airborne SAR imaging algorithm can be implemented with three steps: 1) the azimuth signal is modeled as multicomponent linear frequency modulation (LFM) signal due to the relative movement between the target and radar. 2) The scatterer height position can be obtained by estimating the frequency modulation rate (FMR) for the LFM signal. 3) The 3-D airborne SAR image is obtained via the range-Doppler (RD) algorithm. Furthermore, the reconstruction performance under different rotation patterns, including roll, pitch, and yaw, is analyzed. The availability of the presented novel technique is demonstrated by the results of simulated and real experimental data.

Airborne SAR Radiometric Calibration Based on Improved Sliding Window Integral Method.

To verify the performance of the high-resolution fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor carried by the Xinzhou 60 remote-sensing aircraft, we used corner reflectors to calibrate the acquired data. The target mechanism in high-resolution SAR images is more complex than it is in low-resolution SAR images, the impact of the point target pointing error on the calibration results is more obvious, and the target echo signal of high-resolution images is more easily affected by speckle noise; thus, more accurate extraction of the point target position and the response energy is required. To solve this problem, this paper introduces image context information and proposes a method to precisely determine the integration region of the corner reflector using sliding windows based on the integral method. The validation indicates that the fully polarimetric SAR sensor on the Xinzhou 60 remote-sensing aircraft can accurately reflect the radiometric characteristics of the ground features and that the integral method can obtain more stable results than the peak method. The sliding window allows the position of the point target to be determined more accurately, and the response energy extracted from the image via the integral method is closer to the theoretical value, which means that the high-resolution SAR system can achieve a higher radiometric calibration accuracy. Additionally, cross-validation reveals that the airborne SAR images have similar quality levels to Sentinel-1A and Gaofen-3 images.

C-band and L-band AirSAR image fusion technique using anisotropic diffusion

Image fusion is the process of amalgamation of essential information from multiple images into a single image resulting in a higher resolution image. It is an essential step of image augmentation in satellite imagery. Various frequency bands hold feature information related to a certain frequency range. Image fusion enables to superpose of co-registered images captured from different sensors to yield a better image with features from both the source images. Image fusion helps to get a more detailed single image than multiple images with different features. In our paper, we have presented an anisotropic diffusion-based fusion method for C-band and L-band AirSAR(Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar) images. We found that the anisotropic diffusion method works better than old pansharpening techniques and works much faster and involves much fewer resources than Convolutional Neural Networks.

Time-Domain Azimuth-Variant MOCO Algorithm for Airborne SAR Imaging

Current subaperture-based azimuth-variant motion compensation algorithms for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery usually suffer from the challenge of keeping high precision and efficiency simultaneously. In this letter, a novel motion compensation approach is developed to precisely correct the azimuth-variant motion errors. The proposed algorithm applies a time-domain filter to implement the precise Subaperture-to-Pulse correction, providing a promising azimuth-variant phase correction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiorities of the proposal with real-measured high-squint SAR data.

Geolocation Error Transfer Model and Trajectory Calibration Method for Airborne SAR Considering Motion Compensation Residual Error

Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) location error is affected by the position/speed measurement error of the aircraft, system time error, etc., and also related to the residual error of motion compensation. However, the existing airborne SAR location model rarely considers the effect of residual motion error. Considering that motion and trajectory measurement errors are common in practice, this paper derives a location error transfer model of an airborne SAR image based on the motion compensation and frequency-domain imaging algorithms. The proposed model clarifies the influence of trajectory measurement error on location deviation when residual motion error exists and provides a method of error calibration measurement. The simulation experiments validate the correctness of the proposed location error transfer model. The present method obtains a more accurate error calibration measurement result than the location error model that does not consider the residual motion error, proving the superiority of the proposed model.

Proposal-Copula-Based Fusion of Spaceborne and Airborne SAR Images for Ship Target Detection⁎⁎

In this paper, we consider the problem of fusion of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from spaceborne and airborne sensors and investigate its applications to inshore ship target detection. Existing SAR image fusion methods mainly focus on image denoising or texture enhancement, but show limited improvement of target-to-clutter ratios (TCRs) in composite images and lead to deteriorated target detection performance. To address this issue, we propose a new method for the fusion of spaceborne and airborne SAR images based on the target proposal and the copula theory (TPCT). In TPCT, target and clutter correspondence between different images are exploited to improve the TCRs of composite images. TPCT consists of three steps. First, target proposals are extracted from spaceborne and airborne SAR images and then fused to enhance the common ship target areas therein. Second, a new method to construct the joint probability density function (PDF) of clutter in spaceborne and airborne SAR images is presented to model the statistical dependence of clutter therein based on the copula theory. This copula-based joint PDF is used to suppress the clutter areas remained in the intersection of target proposals. Third, clues from the intersection of target proposals and the copula-based joint PDF of clutter are fused by the Hadamard product to generate the composite image with enhanced ship targets and the suppressed clutter. Experimental results based on measured spaceborne and airborne SAR data show that the proposed TPCT fusion method leads to higher TCRs of composite images and better performance in the ship detection task than other commonly used image fusion methods.

Sea Spike Suppression Method Based on Optimum Polarization Ratio in Airborne SAR Images.

In the condition of ocean observation for high-resolution airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), sea spikes will cause serious interference to SAR image interpretation and marine target detection. In order to improve the ability of target detection, it is necessary to suppress sea spikes in SAR images. However, there is no report on sea spike suppression methods in SAR images. As a step forward, a sea spike suppression method based on optimum polarization ratio in airborne SAR images is proposed in this paper. This method is only applicable to the situation where VV and HH dual-polarized SAR data containing sea spikes are acquired at the same time. By calculating the optimum polarization ratio, this method further obtains the difference image of the panoramic area accomplishing sea spike suppression. This method is applied to a field airborne X-band SAR data, including ocean waves, oil spills and ships. The results show that the sea spikes are well suppressed, the contrast of ocean waves and the contrast of oil spills are improved, and the false alarm rate of ship detection is reduced. The discussions on these results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively suppress sea spikes and improve the interpretability of SAR images.

Azimuth Variant Motion Error Compensation Algorithm for Airborne SAR Imaging Based on Doppler Adjustment

Conventional beam-center approximation-based motion compensation (MOCO) algorithms fail to achieve an optimally focused image in the case of the high-resolution and high-frequency (HRHF) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. In this letter, a novel MOCO algorithm based on Doppler adjustment is developed with the ability to compensate the azimuth variant motion error. The change of the Doppler spectrum caused by the azimuth variant motion error is investigated and is eliminated by Doppler scaling. The proposed MOCO algorithm has dramatically improved precision when compared with the conventional MOCO methods in HRHF SAR imaging. Simulation experiments and extensive comparisons with other MOCO algorithms verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Ship Target Imaging in Airborne SAR System Based on Automatic Image Segmentation and ISAR Technique

The airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image of ship target will be blurred for the complex motion of the target, which will influence the performance of feature extraction and target classification. In this article, a refocusing method of ship target in airborne SAR image though the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) technique is presented. The novel contributions of this article can be summarized as follows: 1) the residual phase of processed signal is analyzed in detail to illustrate the necessity of adopting ISAR technique; 2) a valid, labor-saving, and automatic image segmentation approach via clustering algorithm is put forward for automatic data extraction and inverse mapping. The clustering algorithm we choose is the agglomerative hierarchical cluster algorithm, which does not require the number of categories in advance; 3) the refocused individual ISAR image of individual ship target is yielded though the range-instantaneous Doppler algorithm. Finally, the simulated and real measured data are processed, and imaging results verify the effectiveness of the novel algorithm presented in this article.

Squinted Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging with Unknown Curved Trajectory.

The imagery of airborne highly squinted synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with curved trajectory is a challenging task due to the translational-variant range cell migration (RCM) and azimuth modulation. However, in most cases of practical application, the curved trajectory cannot be accurately known, which brings greater difficulties to the imaging problem. To accommodate these issues, we propose a novel motion modelling and optimisation based imaging algorithm for the highly squinted SAR with unknown curved trajectory. First, to correct the translational-variant RCM, a coarse-to-fine RCM correction scheme as well as a range perturbation approach is applied. Afterwards, an optimisation model of motion information under the criterion of minimum entropy is built during the azimuth processing by nonlinear chirp scaling (NLCS). Correspondingly, a differential evolution (DE) optimisation strategy is proposed to estimate the motion information in an iterative manner. We empirically compare the proposed algorithms with several state-of-the-art highly squinted curved SAR imaging algorithms. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in the case without any prior information of the curved trajectory.