Power Spectra of Very High Resolution SAR Amplitude Images of Urban Areas
G. Di Martino ; A. Iodice ; D. Riccio ; et al. ; - ASI Sponsor
Mar - 2014
DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2014.2311174
ISSN : 1939-1404 ;
journal : IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing

Volume : 7 ; Issue : 7
type: Article Journal

Abstract
With the launch of COSMO/SkyMed and TerraSARX missions, very high resolution (VHR) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of urban areas have become routinely available. In particular, in the spotlight acquisition mode, COSMO/SkyMed SARs are able to obtain a resolution even better than one meter. Accordingly, in principle a huge amount of information on objects present in the urban scenario can be extracted from such images; however, due to the involved interaction between incident electromagnetic wave and imaged scene, direct interpretation of VHR SAR images is not straightforward, and different methods to analyze them are being developed by the scientific community. In this paper, we explore the potentiality of using the power spectral density (PSD) of VHR SAR amplitude images of urban areas for information extraction. First, we propose a theoretical model of the PSD of such images, and then we test the validity of the developed model on COSMO/SkyMed spotlight SAR images of urban areas. Finally, some suggestions are provided on how the parameters of the obtained PSD can be exploited to extract useful information from VHR SAR amplitude images of urban areas.

keywords : Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), urban areas, power spectrum, very high resolution, parameter retrieval

Notes : This work was supported by the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI) within the COSMO/SkyMed AO Project 2202 “Buildings Feature Extraction from SingleSAR Images: Application to COSMO-SkyMed High Resolution SAR Images.”