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Commission Il, Working Group 11.53
INSTRUMENTATION FOR SAR PROCESSING
ACTIVITIES AND CRITICAL AREAS
J.P. Guignard
European Space Agency (ESTEC)
The Netherlands
1. INTRODUCTION
The working group II.5 (Instrumentation for Synthetic Radar
Aperture (SAR) Processing) was created in 1979, at the previous
ISPRS Congress (in Hamburg). The activities of this working
group are aimed at assessing the on-going developments and/or
identifying the required developments of the instrumentation
related to end-to-end SAR systems.
Four years ago, the main difficulties were related to the
pre-processing of SAR data, i.e. the production of a SAR image
in a reasonable time (between 10 and 20 hours typically at this
time). Since the algorithms and other technical difficulties
have been solved and very fast SAR processors are under
development (typically less than one hour per scene).
Nowadays, the challenge is two fold:
- how to optimally extract thematic information from SAR data
- how to optimally use this information as part of a
multi-sensor remote sensing approach. This paper is aimed
at reflecting this evolution.
2. FUNCTIONING OF THE WORKING GROUP
The first meeting, held on December 1981 at Frascati (ESRIN,
EPO) has been devoted to identifying orientations for the work
to be completed during the 1981-1984 period. Based on the
presented papers and on a particular discussion, six topics
have been selected and a task coordinator nominated:
- On-board processing (R. Okkes)
- Ground preprocessing (J. Gredel)
- Algorithms for preprocessing (J. Bennett)
- Acquisition, validation, simulation and Calibration
(R. Brooks)
- SAR processing and image interpretation (A. Goldfinger)
- Radiogrammetry and merging of multi-sensor data
(Fo Leberl).
The role of the tasks coordinator consists of ensuring that the
tutorial papers presented do reflect the opinions of the
working group members. The members are from Europe, Canada,
U.S.A and Japan and this explains the locations of the various
meetings held sa far:
