Scattering Centers Monitoring in Refocused SAR Images on a High Resolution DEM

Andrei Anghel (1) , Gabriel Vasile (1) , Cornel Ioana (1) , Remus Cacoveanu (2) , Silviu Ciochina (2) , Jean-Philippe Ovarlez (3, 4) , Rémy Boudon (5) , Guy d'Urso (5) , Irena Hajnsek (6)

1 GIPSA-SIGMAPHY - GIPSA - Signal Images Physique
2 UPB - University Politehnica of Bucharest [Romania]
3 SONDRA - Sondra, CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay (COmUE)
4 ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab [Palaiseau]
5 EDF R&D - EDF R&D
6 DLR Microwaves and Radar Institute

Infrastructure monitoring applications can require the tracking of slowly moving points of a certain structure. Given a certain point from a structure to be monitored, in the context of available SAR products where the image is already focused in a slant range - azimuth grid, it is not obvious if this point is the scattering center, if it is in layover or if it is visible from the respective orbit. This paper proposes a scattering center monitoring procedure based on refocusing a set of SAR images on a provided high-resolution DEM of the structure. The scattering centers of the refocused image are detected in the 4-D tomography framework by testing if the main response is at zero elevation in the local elevation-velocity spectral distribution obtained using the Capon estimator. The algorithm is validated on real data acquired with the TerraSAR-X satellite over the Puylaurent water dam in France during March-June 2012. The relative displacements between scattering regions show very good agreement with the in situ measurements.

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Andrei Anghel, Gabriel Vasile, Cornel Ioana, Remus Cacoveanu, Silviu Ciochina, et al.. Scattering Centers Monitoring in Refocused SAR Images on a High Resolution DEM. IGARSS 2014 - IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, Jul 2014, Québec, Canada. pp.1883-1886, ⟨10.1109/IGARSS.2014.6946824⟩. ⟨hal-01104814⟩