This study presents a new back-propagation (BP) method to determine the vertical location of ionospheric irregularities using GNSS Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO) signals. GNSS-RO employs signals from GNSS satellites intercepted by Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites to gather data about different atmospheric layers, e.g., the ionosphere, which are crucial for weather prediction and studying ionospheric dynamics. The BP method involves computing diffractive integrals along the LEO path to identify disturbances such as sporadic E-layer clouds and equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs). By effectively unwinding diffraction and multipath effects, the method pinpoints regions with minimal amplitude disturbance, indicating the location of ionospheric irregularities along the ray path. Beside estimates along the horizontal axis, case studies demonstrate the new method's capabilities in locating and estimating the vertical extent of these irregularities, showing its potential to enhance ionospheric modelling and forecasting. Results achieved show consistency with previous publications on the topic as well as methodologies used to locate ionospheric irregularities, allowing the presented method a better picture of the ionospheric irregularity.
This paper presents new case studies for thestatistical analysis for wavelength resolution SAR image stacks.The statistical analysis considers the Anderson-Darling goodnessof-fit test in a set of pixel samples from the same position obtainedfrom a SAR image stack. The test is applied in wavelengthresolution SAR image stacks. The present work consists of twocase studies based on the use of multiple-pass stacks and TypeI error using the False Discovery Rate controlling procedures.In addition, an application scenario is presented for the studiedscenarios.
This paper presents two incoherent change detection methods for wavelength-resolution synthetic aperture radars (SAR) image stacks based on masking techniques. The first technique proposed is the Simple Masking Detection (SMD). This method uses the statistical behavior of pixels-sets in the image stack to create a binary mask, which is used to remove pixels that are not related to changes in a surveillance image from the same interest region. The second technique is the Multiple Concatenated Masking Detection (MCMD), which produces a more selective mask than the SMD by concatenating multiple masks from different image stacks. The MCMD can be used in specific applications where multiple stacks share common patterns of target deployments. Both proposed techniques were evaluated using 24 incoherent SAR images obtained by the CARABAS II system. The experimental results revealed that the proposed detection methods have better performance in terms of probability of detection and false alarm rate when compared with other change detection techniques, especially for high detection probabilities scenarios.
This letter presents two new change detection (CD) methods for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image stacks based on the Neyman-Pearson criterion. The first proposed method uses the data from wavelength-resolution images stack to obtain background statistics, which are used in a hypothesis test to detect changes in a surveillance image. The second method considers a priori information about the targets to obtain the target statistics, which are used together with the previously obtained background statistics, to perform a hypothesis test to detect changes in a surveillance image. A straightforward processing scheme is presented to test the proposed CD methods. To assess the performance of both proposed methods, we considered the coherent all radio band sensing (CARABAS)-II SAR images. In particular, to obtain the temporal background statistics required by the derived methods, we used stacks with six images. The experimental results show that the proposed techniques provide a competitive performance in terms of probability of detection and false alarm rate compared with other CD methods. CCBY
This letter presents a clutter statistical analysis for stacks of wavelength-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Each image stack consists of SAR images generated by the same sensor, using the same flight track illuminating the same scene but with a time separation between the illuminations. We test three candidate statistical distributions for time changes in the stack, namely, Rician, Rayleigh, and log-normal. The tests results reveal that the Rician distribution is a very good candidate for modeling stack of wavelength-resolution SAR images, where 98.59 & x0025; of the tested samples passed the Anderson-Darling (AD) goodness-of-fit test. Also, it is observed that the presence of changes in the ground scene is related to the tested samples that have failed in the AD test for the Rician distribution hypothesis.
This article presents Bayes' theorem for wavelength-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) change detection method development. Different change detection methods can be derived using Bayes' theorem in combination with the target model, clutter-plus-noise model, iterative implementation, and noniterative implementation. As an example of the Bayes' theorem use for wavelength-resolution SAR change detection method development, we propose a simple change detection method with a clutter-plus-noise model and noniterative implementation. In spite of simplicity, the proposed method provides a very competitive performance in terms of probability of detection and false alarm rate. The best result was a probability of detection of $\text{98.7}\%$ versus a false alarm rate of one per square kilometer.
This paper presents an iterative change detection (CD) method based on Bayes’ theorem for very high-frequency (VHF) ultra-wideband (UWB) SAR images considering commonly used clutter-plus-noise statistical models. The proposed detection technique uses the information of the detected changes to iteratively update the data and distribution information, obtaining more accurate clutter-plus-noise statistics resulting in false alarm reduction. The Bivariate Rayleigh and Bivariate Gaussian distributions are investigated as candidates to model the clutter-plus-noise, and the Anderson-Darling goodness-of-fit test is used to investigate three scenarios of interest. Different aspects related to the distributions are discussed, the observed mismatches are analyzed, and the impact of the distribution chosen for the proposed iterative change detection method is analyzed. Finally, the proposed iterative method performance is assessed in terms of the probability of detection and false alarm rate and compared with other competitive solutions. The experimental evaluation uses data from real measurements obtained using the CARABAS II SAR system. Results show that the proposed iterative CD algorithm performs better than the other methods. Author
The expansion of the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to the emerging THz spectrum has enabled a new era of applications in the areas of automobile, security, non-destructive testing, and material characterization. Thanks to the sub-mm wavelength, extraction of material surface properties is possible and of significant interest for the THz SAR applications. The properties define the surface scattering behavior, which is relational to the applied frequency. This study focuses on surface classification. We evaluate the scattering behavior of a rough surface and a smooth surface at 1.5 THz based on a SAR processing sequence that is introduced in this paper. First, we form the 3D SAR images of the metallic objects and then evaluate the surface properties based on the variation in the energy reflected by the object's surface.
In radar systems, the frequency range is being extended to high frequencies such as THz for sub-mm resolution. The spectrum offers high resolution but on the contrary, propagation distance and penetration depth are limited because of smaller wavelength. It suffers from higher atmospheric absorption in comparison to sub-GHz systems. In comparison to optical technology, the radar technique majorly benefits with respect to the penetration property such as cloud/smoke cover penetration and detection of concealed objects. However, the THz range and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging of concealed objects are not very well established. Therefore, this paper examines this property at THz. A testbed has been set up with a bandwidth of 110 GHz at a carrier frequency of 275 GHz. The imaging is performed of a very small metal object. Firstly, the sub-mm resolution is validated with the experiment after that the range and SAR imaging are performed in which this object is covered with different types of materials. The backscattered data is processed with the image reconstruction algorithms and the results are presented in this paper with respect to sub-mm resolution and detection. © 2020 IEEE.
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology is most commonly used in the frequency span of sub-30 GHz which provides the spatial resolution in the range of sub-cm. This technology is being extended to higher frequencies such as millimeter wave and THz region to achieve higher resolution in the range of sub-mm. This expands the SAR applications for material characterization, classification and sub-mm localization. However, the region is suitable for short propagation distance such as an indoor environment. Therefore, to investigate the achieved resolution and quality of the SAR images at THz, an indoor SAR testbed based on vector network analyzer has been setup for the measurements. This paper explains the indoor SAR geometry and describes the associated testbed along with the system parameters. The measurements are performed at a centre frequency of 275 GHz with a bandwidth of 110 GHz. The measurement results are analyzed for the theoretical resolution with the Backprojection Algorithm and the findings are presented in this paper. The sub-mm spatial resolution imaging of two small size metallic objects are performed. © WSA 2020.
Automatic target recognition (ATR) algorithms have been successfully used for vehicle classification in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images over the past few decades. For this application, however, the scarcity of labeled data is often a limiting factor for supervised approaches. While the advent of computer-simulated images may result in additional data for ATR, there is still a substantial gap between synthetic and measured images. In this paper, we propose the so-called adaptive target enhancer (ATE), a tool designed to automatically delimit and weight the region of an image that contains or is affected by the presence of a target. Results for the publicly released Synthetic and Measured Paired and Labeled Experiment (SAMPLE) dataset show that, by defining regions of interest and suppressing the background, we can increase the classification accuracy from 68% to 84% while only using artificially generated images for training. © 2023 IEEE.
In this paper, we present an unsupervised automatic target detection algorithm for multitemporal SAR images. The proposed two-fold method is expected to reduce processing time for large scene sizes with sparse targets while still improving detection performance. Firstly, pixel blocks are extracted from an initial change map to reduce the algorithm's search space and favor target detection. Secondly, an adaptive k-means algorithm selects the number of clusters that better separates targets from false alarms, which are discarded. Preliminary results show the advantages of the proposed method in processing time and detection performance over a recently proposed supervised method for the CARABAS-II dataset.
In this letter, we propose a method to reduce the number of false alarms in a wavelength-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) change detection scheme by using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The detection is performed in two steps: change analysis and object classification. A simple technique for wavelength-resolution SAR change detection is implemented to extract potential targets from the image of interest. A CNN is then used for classifying the change map detections as either a target or nontarget, further reducing the false alarm rate (FAR). The scheme is tested for the CARABAS-II data set, where only three false alarms over a testing area of 96 km² are reported while still sustaining a probability of detection above 96%. We also show that the network can still reduce the FAR even when the flight heading of the SAR system measurement campaign differs by up to 100° between the images used for training and test. CCBY
The aim of this letter is to compare two incoherent change-detection algorithms for target detection in low-frequency ultrawideband (UWB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The considered UWB SAR operates in the frequency range from 20 to 90 MHz. Both approaches employ a likelihood ratio test according to the Neyman–Pearson criterion. First, the bivariate Rayleigh probability distribution is used to implement the likelihood ratio test function. This distribution is well known and has been used for change-detection algorithms in low-frequency UWB SAR with good results. Aiming to minimize the false alarm rate and taking into consideration that low-frequency UWB SAR images have high resolution compared to the transmitted wavelength, the second approach implements the test by using a bivariate K-distribution. This distribution has scale and shape parameters that can be used to adjust it to the data. No filter is applied to the data set images, and the results show that with a good statistical model, it is not needed to rely on filtering the data to decrease the number of false alarms. Therefore, we can have a better tradeoff between resolution and detection performance.
In this paper we propose a new change detection (CD) algorithm based on the Bayes theorem and probability assignments. Differently from any kind of likelihood ratio test (LRT) algorithms, the proposed algorithm does not present target alarms, but the probability of certain image position is a target position. In other words, the proposed method leads to quantitative estimates on the probability of a target at any pixel, whereas LRT algorithms can only be used as a figure of merit for any pixel to contain a target.
The THz frequency spectrum opens a lot of applications in the imaging at sub-mm level. The increase of the operating frequency band for SAR imaging systems to the THz range has proportionally affected the amount of raw data to be stored and used for accurate image reconstruction. As a consequence, improvements in the existing SAR imaging algorithms to reduce the amount of data needed to achieve the appropriate quality of imaging is desired. This paper introduces the phase control procedure as an extension to the existing sinc interpolator for backprojecting complex-valued FMCW SAR data into a defined image plane. The proposed extension controls the phase of interpolated complex-valued SAR data parameters so that it includes appropriate information about the range distance between the SAR system and the given point of space. The extended algorithm is incorporated into the global backprojection algorithm and examined on the measurement data acquired via the 2pSENSE FMCW SAR system. The efficiency of the extended algorithm is evaluated through the comparison with the conventional nearest neighbor and sinc interpolation algorithms. © 2022 Warsaw University of Technology.
Time-domain backprojection algorithms are widely used in state-of-the-art synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging systems that are designed for applications where motion error compensation is required. These algorithms include an interpolation procedure, under which an unknown SAR range-compressed data parameter is estimated based on complex-valued SAR data samples and backprojected into a defined image plane. However, the phase of complex-valued SAR parameters estimated based on existing interpolators does not contain correct information about the range distance between the SAR imaging system and the given point of space in a defined image plane, which affects the quality of reconstructed SAR scenes. Thus, a phase-control procedure is required. This paper introduces extensions of existing linear, cubic, and sinc interpolation algorithms to interpolate complex-valued SAR data, where the phase of the interpolated SAR data value is controlled through the assigned a priori known range time that is needed for a signal to reach the given point of the defined image plane and return back. The efficiency of the extended algorithms is tested at the Nyquist rate on simulated and real data at THz frequencies and compared with existing algorithms. In comparison to the widely used nearest-neighbor interpolation algorithm, the proposed extended algorithms are beneficial from the lower computational complexity perspective, which is directly related to the offering of smaller memory requirements for SAR image reconstruction at THz frequencies. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
The THz frequency spectrum provides an opportunity to explore high-resolution synthetic-aperture-radar (SAR) short-range imaging that can be used for various applications. However, the performance of THz SAR imaging is sensitive to phase errors that can be caused by an insufficient amount of data samples for image formation and by path deviations that can be practically caused by SAR platform vibrations, changes in speed, changes in direction, and acceleration. To solve the former problem, an improved interpolation procedure for backprojection algorithms has been proposed. However, to make these algorithms efficient in handling the latter problem, an additional autofocusing is necessary. In this paper, we introduce an autofocusing procedure based on compressed sensing that is incorporated into the backprojection algorithm. The reconstruction is based on the following calculated parameters: windowed interpolation sinc kernel, and range distances between SAR platform and image pixels in a defined image plane. The proposed approach is tested on real data, which was acquired by the 2\pi FMCW SAR system through outdoor SAR imaging. © 2023 IEEE.
The paper proposes the extensions of the available linear and cubic interpolation methods for backprojecting complex SAR data into an image plane. Due to the fact that the phase of complex SAR data is very sensitive to the shift in time, the proposed interpolations include the phase control of the interpolated complex values. The proposed methods are examined with the global backprojection algorithm that is used to process SAR data at THz frequencies. In numerical examples, a two-dimensional indoor THz SAR imaging for a point target is considered, where the developed interpolation methods are compared with the nearest neighbor approach. © 2021 IEEE.
In this paper, we present three algorithms for the multitemporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images coregistration. The proposed algorithms are a 2-D cross correlation, a 1-D parabolic based, and a 2-D projective transformation. The 2-D cross correlation algorithm is used to obtain coarse estimation of the displacement for coregistration. In the second method, two independent 1-D parabolic interpolations are calculated to refine the estimation of the peak location of the cross correlation matrix with subpixel accuracy. Finally, in the third method, a 2-D projective transformation is employed to align the SAR images using point correspondences and the cubic interpolation. The performance evaluation of these algorithms are provided based on the coherence magnitude and the absolute displacement error for a point target using a corner reflector in the scene. The experimental results obtained on real recorded multitemporal satellite SAR data demonstrate the effectiveness and the computational complexity of these algorithms. © 2022 IEEE.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data are widely used for remote sensing applications, such as change detection and environmental monitoring. This paper presents a recent measurement campaign for SAR images using the LORA system and investigates the applicability of the collected data for change detection. The region of interest in this study is a busy commercial harbour area in the south of Sweden. During the measurements, there were significant changes on the ground in the parking lot as trucks were disembarking a ship. The obtained SAR images were first filtered to have similar regions of interest in the Fourier domain to increase the coherence magnitude. Then, a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) algorithm was employed to detect changes with respect to trucks. In addition, optical aerial images were collected during this measurement campaign and were utilized to adjust the CFAR detection threshold. As a result, all the changed and unchanged regions corresponding to the selected targets were detected successfully. Moreover, a pattern of trucks’ utilization of the harbour’s parking lot during this peak time was obtained. The results demonstrate the applicability of the data from the ongoing measurement campaign and the possibility of further algorithm development for target detection and classification.
Radio Occultation based on Global Navigation Satellite System signals (GNSS RO) is an increasingly important remote sensing technique. Its measurements are used to derive parameter of the Earth's atmosphere, e.g., pressure, temperature and humidity, with good accuracy. The systematic residual error present on the data processing is related to ionospheric conditions, such as the distribution of electrons and the resultant vertical gradient. This study investigates the relationship between these parameters and the residual ionospheric error (RIE) on the retrieved bending angle in the stratosphere. Chapman function combined to sinusoidal perturbations are used to model electron density profiles and compared to RO retrievals of the ionosphere to perform the investigation. The results confirmed that the major ionospheric influence on the retrieval error is related to the F-layer electron density peak, whereas small-scale vertical structures play a minor role.
Besides providing electron density profiles (EDP), GNSS Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO) measurements allow monitoring the frequency and the areas where ionospheric scintillations occur. In this work, RO measurements composing an experimental data set are processed with the back propagation (BP) method to estimate the location of sporadic E-clouds and equatorial plasma bubbles (EPB). The data set includes non-conventional measurements tracked up to 600 km (generally around 80 km), covering F-region heights, shortly before MetOp-A was decommissioned. Results indicate the combination of extended occultations and the BP method is promising for monitoring the occurrence and characterizing ionospheric irregularities in the F-region and the E-region. © 2023 International Union of Radio Science.
Wave optics propagators (WOPs) are commonlyused to describe the propagation of radio signals through earth’satmosphere. In radio occultation (RO) context, multiple phasescreen (MPS) method has been used to model the effects of theatmosphere in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signalsduring an occultation event. WOP implementation includes,in addition to MPS, a diffraction integral as the final step tocalculate the radio signal measured in the low-earth orbit (LEO)satellite. This approach considers vacuum as the propagationmedium at high altitudes, which is not always the case when theionosphere is taken into account in simulations. An alternativeapproach is using MPS all the way to LEO in order to samplethe GNSS signal in orbit. This approach, named MPS orbitsampling (MPS-OS), is evaluated in this letter. Different scenariosof setting occultation assuming a short segment of the LEO orbithave been simulated using MPS and MPS-OS. Results have beencompared to Abel transform references. Furthermore, a longsegment scenario has been evaluated as well. A comparison ofbending angle (BA) and residual ionospheric error (RIE) showsthe equivalence between MPS and MPS-OS results. The mainapplication of MPS-OS should be in occultation events with longsegments of orbit and including ionosphere, in which a standardWOP may not be appropriate.
The back propagation (BP) method consists of diffractive integrals computed over a trajectory path, projecting a signal to different planes. It unwinds the diffraction and multipath, resulting in minimum disturbance on the BP amplitude when the auxiliary plane coincides with the region causing the diffraction. The method has been previously applied in GNSS Radio Occultation (RO) measurements showing promising results in the location estimate of ionospheric irregularities but without complementary data to validate the estimation. In this study, we investigate with wave optics propagator (WOP) simulations of an equatorial C/NOFS occultation with scintillation signatures caused by an equatorial plasma bubble (EPB), which was parametrized with aid of collocated data. In addition, a few more test cases were designed to assess the BP method regarding size, intensity and placement of single and multiple irregularity regions. The results show a location estimate accuracy of 10 km (single bubble, reference case), where in multiple bubble scenarios only the strongest disturbance would be resolved properly. The minimum detectable disturbance level and the estimation accuracy depend on the receiver noise level, and in the case of several bubbles on the distance between them. The remarks of the evaluation supported the interpretation of results for two COSMIC occultations.
Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Radio Occultation (RO) has provided high- quality atmospheric data assimilated in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models and climatol- ogy studies for more than 20 years. In the satellite–satellite GNSS-RO geometry, the measurements are susceptible to ionospheric scintillation depending on the solar and geomagnetic activity, seasons, geographical location and local time. This study investigates the application of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm in developing an automatic detection model of F-layer scintillation in GNSS-RO measurements using power spectral density (PSD). The model is intended for future analyses on the influence of space weather and solar activity on RO data products over long time periods. A novel data set of occultations is used to train the SVM algorithm. The data set is composed of events at low latitudes on 15–20 March 2015 (St. Patrick’s Day geomagnetic storm, high solar flux) and 14–19 May 2018 (quiet period, low solar flux). A few conditional criteria were first applied to a total of 5340 occultations to define a set of 858 scintillation candidates. Models were trained with scintillation indices and PSDs as training features and were either linear or Gaussian kernel. The investigations also show that besides the intensity PSD, the (excess) phase PSD has a positive contribution in increasing the detection of true positives.
Like any other system relying on trans-ionospheric propagation, GNSS Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO) is affected by ionospheric conditions during measurements. Regions of plasma irregularities in F-region create abrupt gradients in the distribution of ionized particles. Radio signals propagated through such regions suffer from constructive and destructive contributions in phase and amplitude, known as scintillations. Different approaches have been proposed in order to model and reproduce the wave propagation through ionospheric irregularities. We present simulations considering an one-component inverse power-law model of irregularities integrated with Multiple Phase Screen (MPS) propagation. In this work, the capability of the scintillation model to reproduce features in the signal amplitude of low latitude MetOp measurements in the early hours of DOY 76, 2015 (St. Patrick’s Day geomagnetic storm) is evaluated. Power spectral density (PSD) analysis, scintillation index, decorrelation time and standard deviation of neutral bending angle are considered in the comparison between the simulations and RO measurements. The results validate the capability of the simulator to replicate an equivalent total integrated phase variance in cases of moderate to strong scintillation.
This paper presents an analysis of pre-filtered clutter VHF SAR images. The image data are reorganized into sub-vectors based on the observation of the image-pair magnitude samples. Based on this approach, we present a statistical description of the SAR clutter obtained by the subtraction between two real SAR images. The statistical analysis based on bivariate distribution data organized into different intervals of magnitude can be an important tool to further understand the properties of the backscattered signal, which can be a valuable premise for change detection processing.
This paper presents a statistical analysis of intensity wavelength-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) difference images. In this analysis, Anderson Darling goodness-of-fit tests are performed, considering two different statistical distributions as candidates for modeling the clutter-plus-noise, i.e., the background statistics. The results show that the Gamma distribution is a good fit for the background of the tested SAR images, especially when compared with the Exponential distribution. Based on the results of this statistical analysis, a change detection application for the detection of concealed targets is presented. The adequate selection of the background distribution allows for the evaluated change detection method to achieve a better performance in terms of probability of detection and false alarm rate, even when compared with competitive performance change detection methods in the literature. For instance, in an experimental evaluation considering a data set obtained by the Coherent All Radio Band Sensing (CARABAS) II UWB SAR system, the evaluated change detection method reached a detection probability of 0.981 for a false alarm rate of 1/km2. © 2023 by the authors.
Change detection is an important synthetic aperture radar (SAR) application, usually used to detect changes on the ground scene measurements in different moments in time. Traditionally, change detection algorithm (CDA) is mainly designed for two synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images retrieved at different instants. However, more images can be used to improve the algorithms performance, witch emerges as a research topic on SAR change detection. Image stack information can be treated as a data series over time and can be modeled by autoregressive (AR) models. Thus, we present some initial findings on SAR change detection based on image stack considering AR models. Applying AR model for each pixel position in the image stack, we obtained an estimated image of the ground scene which can be used as a reference image for CDA. The experimental results reveal that ground scene estimates by the AR models is accurate and can be used for change detection applications. © 2018 SPIE.
The presence of outliers (anomalous values) in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and the misspecification in statistical image models may result in inaccurate inferences. To avoid such issues, the Rayleigh regression model based on a robust estimation process is proposed as a more realistic approach to model this type of data. This article aims at obtaining Rayleigh regression model parameter estimators robust to the presence of outliers. The proposed approach considered the weighted maximum likelihood method and was submitted to numerical experiments using simulated and measured SAR images. Monte Carlo simulations were employed for the numerical assessment of the proposed robust estimator performance in finite signal lengths, their sensitivity to outliers, and the breakdown point. For instance, the nonrobust estimators show a relative bias value 65-fold larger than the results provided by the robust approach in corrupted signals. In terms of sensitivity analysis and break down point, the robust scheme resulted in a reduction of about 96% and 10%, respectively, in the mean absolute value of both measures, in compassion to the nonrobust estimators. Moreover, two SAR datasets were used to compare the ground type and anomaly detection results of the proposed robust scheme with competing methods in the literature. © 2022 IEEE.
This letter introduces a novel regression model structure for the inflated Rayleigh distribution, which effectively models high dynamic amplitude pixel values in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The proposed model estimates the mean of inflated Rayleigh distribution signals by a structure that includes a set of regressors and a link function. The inflated Rayleigh distribution combines the Rayleigh and a degenerate distribution, assigning non-null probability specifically for observed values equal to zero. Null pixel values in amplitude SAR images can be randomly distributed within the image, especially in low-intensity areas; a model capable of incorporating these values is essential to avoid changes in image statistics. Extensive evaluations are conducted using simulated and real SAR images to validate the proposed model, specifically focusing on ground-type detection in high dynamic amplitude pixel values scenarios. The performance of the proposed inflated Rayleigh regression model is compared with traditional Gaussian-based regression models, excelling in terms of ground-type detection in a SAR image obtained from the ICEYE radar.
This paper presents five different statistical methods for ground scene prediction (GSP) in wavelength-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The GSP image can be used as a reference image in a change detection algorithm yielding a high probability of detection and low false alarm rate. The predictions are based on image stacks, which are composed of images from the same scene acquired at different instants with the same flight geometry. The considered methods for obtaining the ground scene prediction include (i) autoregressive models; (ii) trimmed mean; (iii) median; (iv) intensity mean; and (v) mean. It is expected that the predicted image presents the true ground scene without change and preserves the ground backscattering pattern. The study indicates that the the median method provided the most accurate representation of the true ground. To show the applicability of the GSP, a change detection algorithm was considered using the median ground scene as a reference image. As a result, the median method displayed the probability of detection of 97 % and a false alarm rate of 0 . 11 / km 2 , when considering military vehicles concealed in a forest.
Synthetic aperture radars (SAR) data plays an important role in remote sensing applications. It is common knowledge that SAR image amplitude pixels can be approximately modeled by the Rayleigh distribution. However, this model is contin-uous and does not accommodate points with non-zero prob-ability, such as a null pixel amplitude value. Thus, in this paper, we propose an inflated Rayleigh distribution for SAR image modeling that is based on a mixed continuous-discrete distribution and can be used to fit signals with observed values on [0, infty). The maximum likelihood approach is considered to estimate the parameters of the proposed distribution. An empirical experiment with a SAR image is also presented and discussed. © 2022 IEEE.
This paper describes a new measurement campaign for SAR images. The data consists of images collected by the Swedish LORA system associated with VHF-band (19-90 MHz). Due to the system frequency, detecting targets concealed in a forest is possible. Thus, this paper aims to share with the community the results of utilizing new VHF-band SAR data that allows the development of new methods for target and other change detection. In particular, to show the applicability of the new data set, a simple change detection method was performed to detect targets in a forest, resulting in 100% of detection, associated with no false alarm in a particular region of interest.
This paper addresses the problem of mutual interference between automotive radars. The rapid growth of automotive and commercial radar systems on the market does not only facilitate new applications, e.g., advanced driver assistant systems, but also put demands on the possibilities for co-existence, i.e. cohabitant systems. For military radar systems, various jammer and interference mitigation methods have been extensively analyzed and evaluated for decades. However, until now, the co-existence and influence of jamming/interference have almost been ignored for the commercial radar business. A Generalized Inner Product, GIP, test based outlier detector and interference estimation is presented here, which suppress the interferences only in those Directions of Arrival, DOA, and time domain portions where the nuisance signals appear. We will denote this GIP test based Interference Detector and Suppression as the GIDS method. Using GIDS, the target detection performance for the specific interference DOA will merely have a small loss instead of being completely suppressed, e.g., sample matrix inversion implementation of spatial nulling. The proposed technique is robust and does not rely on any calibration for the interference cancellation. Based on simulation and experimental data, we have shown that without losing target detection performance, we achieved up to about 30 dB enhancement for the Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio.
One important application of Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR) is positioning of targets with high accuracy in both azimuth and range. If the target is moving and a multi-channel SAR system is used also the speed components in azimuth and range can be found with a high accuracy. In this paper we propose a method to estimate the accuracy of such a multichannel SAR system. The method is based on the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB). To exemplify the method the variance of parameter estimates by a single channel UHF UWB SAR system is found.
The paper introduces a new likelihood ratio test (LRT) for incoherent detection of man-made objects obscured by foliage in forest area. The test is performed to detect changes between a reference image and a surveillance image. The method is developed for change detection in high resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). For simplicity and lack of more appropriate models, the new LRT is still based on simple and efficient models. If there is no man-made object, the statistical model for clutter and noise of two images will be a bivariate Rayleigh distribution. In contrary, a joint distribution of Rayleigh and uniform is used to model for target, clutter, and noise. The proposed LRT is evaluated using radar data acquired by CARABAS in northern Sweden. The probability of detection is up to 96% with much less than one false alarm per square kilometer. © 2017 IEEE.
This paper addresses multi-dimensional Ground Moving Target Indication (GMTI) using a multi-channel Wide Band (WB) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system. For limited time intervals the target acceleration is so small that target motion can be related to two ground and two speed coordinates. However, four other dimensions are used in WB SAR GMTI processing during the detection phase: azimuth, range, bearing, and the relative speed between the object and the SAR platform. In the detection phase, blind hypotheses are used, and the discretization steps between the hypotheses are a trade-off between the number of hypotheses tested and detectability. As the integration angle increases, the bandwidth increases and the therefore the number of tests increases. In this paper we discuss the discretization step in all four dimensions for moving target detection, and analyze the step size in particular in the most critical domain, the relative speed. The analysis is made on CARABAS II data.
Wavelength-resolution (WR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) change detection (CD) has been used to detect concealed targets in forestry areas. However, most proposed methods are generally based on matrix or vector analyses and, therefore, do not exploit information embedded in multidimensional data. In this letter, a CD method for WR SAR image stacks based on tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA) is proposed. The proposed CD method used the new tensor nuclear norm induced by the definition of the tensor-tensor product to exploit temporal and spatial information contained in the image stack. To assess the performance of the proposed method, we considered SAR images obtained by the very high frequency (VHF) WR CARABAS-II SAR system. Experiments for three different stack sizes show that a significant performance gain can be achieved when large image stacks are considered. The proposed CD method performs better in terms of probability of detection (PD) and false alarm rate (FAR) than the other five CD methods in VHF WR SAR images, including one based on matrix robust principal component analysis (RPCA). In a particular setting, it achieves a PD of 99% and a FAR of 0.028 false alarms per km2. Authors
Recently, it was demonstrated that low-frequency wavelength-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images could be considered to follow an additive mixing model due to their backscatter characteristics. This simplification allows for the use of source separation methods, such as robust principal component analysis (RPCA) via principal component pursuit (PCP), for detecting changes in those images. In this manuscript, a change detection method for wavelength-resolution SAR images based on image stack through RPCA is proposed. The method aims to explore both the temporal and flight heading diversity of a set of wavelength-resolution multitemporal SAR images in order to detect concealed targets in forestry areas. A heuristic based on three rules for better exploring the RPCA results is introduced, and a new configurable parameter for false alarm reduction based on the analysis of image windows is proposed. The method is evaluated using real data obtained from measurements of the ultrawideband (UWB) very high-frequency (VHF) SAR system CARABAS-II. Experiments for stacks of four and seven reference images are conducted, and the use of reference images acquired with different flight headings is explored. The results indicate that a gain in performance can be achieved by using large image stacks containing, at least, one image of each possible flight heading of the data set, which can result in a probability of detection (PD) above 99% for a false alarm rate (FAR) as low as one false alarm per three square kilometers. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that high PD and low FAR can be achieved, also considering images from similar flight headings as reference images. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Change detection methods are frequently associated with wavelength-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images for foliage-penetrating (FOPEN) applications (e.g., the detection of concealed targets in forestry areas), being a research topic of interest over the last decades. The challenge associated with the design of automated change detection techniques goes beyond performing the target detection. It is also related to clutter suppression aiming at a low false alarm rate (FAR). The problem of detecting targets and removing content in SAR data can be treated as an unsupervised signal separation problem, usually referred to as blind source separation (BSS). Additionally, low frequency wavelength-resolution SAR images can be considered to follow an additive separation model due to their backscatter characteristics. In this context, it is possible to explore robust principal component analysis (RPCA) as a source-separation method for problems in which the mixing model is additive and two-dimensional, as the interest SAR images. This paper presents a change detection method for wavelengthresolution SAR images based on the RPCA via principal component pursuit (PCP), considering the use of small image stacks to explore the data diversity from measurements of different flight headings. The proposed method is evaluated using real data obtained from measurements of the ultrawideband (UWB) very high frequency (VHF) SAR system CARABAS II. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve a high probability of detection (PD) values for a low FAR (i.e., PD of 0.98 for a FAR of 0.41 objects per square kilometer). Finally, discussions regarding the use of the RPCA in change detection methods and the diversity gains are provided in the paper. © SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
This letter presents an analysis of prefiltered clutter ultrawideband (UWB) very high frequency synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The image data are reorganized into subvectors based on the observation of the image-pair magnitude samples. Based on this approach, we present a statistical description of the SAR clutter obtained by the subtraction between two real SAR images. The statistical analysis based on bivariate distribution data organized into different intervals of magnitude can be an important tool to further understand the properties of the backscattered signal for low-frequency SAR images. In this letter, it is found that, for “good” image pairs, the subtracted image has Gaussian distributed clutter backscattering and that the noise mainly consists of the thermal noise and, therefore, speckle noise does not have to be considered. This is a consequence of the stable backscattering for a UWB low-frequency SAR system.
This paper addresses the use of a data analysis tool, known as robust principal component analysis (RPCA), in the context of change detection (CD) in ultrawideband (UWB) very high-frequency (VHF) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The method considers image pairs of the same scene acquired at different time instants. The CD method aims to maximize the probability of detection (PD) and minimize the false alarm rate (FAR). Such aim fits into a multiobjective optimization problem, since maximizing the probability of detection generally implies an increase in the number of false alarms. In that sense, varying the RPCA regularization parameter leads to PD variation with respect to FAR, which is known as receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. To evaluate the proposed method, the CARABAS-II data set was considered. The experimental results show that RPCA via principal component pursuit (PCP) can provide a good trade-off between PD and FAR. A comparison between the results obtained with the proposed method and a classical CD algorithm based on the likelihood ratio test provides the pros and cons of the proposed method. © 2020 by the authors.
High accuracy of impact height is important to get reliableRadio Occultation (RO) measurements of the atmosphere refractivity.We have made an investigation on how accuratelywe can measure the impact height at ground level using waveoptics simulations, realistic refractivity profiles, a realisticsimulator for an advanced RO instrument including noise,and using phase matching for the inversion. The idea of theinvestigation is to increase the measurement accuracy of impactheight at low altitudes and to give reliable measurementseven in cases of super-refractive layers. We present statisticson the accuracy and precision of the determination of theimpact height at ground, as well as the resulting accuracy andprecision in the measured refractivity.
Global Navigation Satellite System Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO) is a technique used to sound the atmosphere and derive vertical profiles of refractivity. Signals from GNSS satellites are received in a low-Earth orbit, and they are then processed to produce bending angle profiles, from which meteorological parameters can be retrieved. Generating two-dimensional images in the form of spectrograms from GNSS-RO signals is commonly done to, for instance, investigate reflections or estimate signal quality in the lower troposphere. This is typically implemented using, e.g., the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) to produce a time-frequency representation that is subsequently transformed to bending angle (BA) and impact height (IH) coordinates by non-linear mapping. In this paper, we propose an alternative method based on a straightforward extension of the Phase Matching (PM) operator to produce two-dimensional spectral images in the BA-IH domain by applying a sliding window. This Sliding Window Phase Matching (SWPM) method generates the spectral amplitude on an arbitrary grid in BA and IH, e.g., along the coordinate axes. To illustrate, we show both SWPM and STFT methods applied to operational MetOp-A data. For SWPM we use a constant window in the BA-dimension, whereas for STFT we use a conventional constant time window. We show that the SWPM method produces the same result as STFT when the same window length is used for both methods. The sample points in impact parameter and bending angle are those generated by and the main advantage is that SWPM offers the user a convenient way to freely sample the BA-IH space. The cost for this is processing time that is somewhat longer than implementations based on the Fast Fourier Transform, such as the STFT method.
Global Navigation Satellite System Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO) is an important technique used to sound the Earth's atmosphere and provide data products to numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems as well as toclimate research. It provides a high vertical resolution and SI-traceability that are both valuable complements toother Earth observation systems. In addition to direct components refracted in the atmosphere, many received RO signals contain reflected components thanks to the specular and relatively smooth characteristics of the ocean. These reflected components can interfere the retrieval of the direct part of the signal, and can also contain meteorological information of their own, e.g., information about the refractivity at the Earth's surface. While the conventional method to detect such reflections is by using radio-holographic methods, it has been shown that it is possible to see reflections using wave optics inversion, specically while inspecting the amplitude of the output of phase matching (PM). The primary objective of this paper is to analyze the appearance of these reflections in the amplitude output from another wave optics algorithm, namely the much faster full spectrum inversion (FSI). PM and FSI are closely related algorithms - they both use the method of stationary phase to derive the bending angle from a measured signal. We apply our own implementation of FSI to the same GNSS-RO measurements that PM was previously applied to and show that the amplitudes of the outputs again indicate reflection in the surface of the ocean. Our results show that the amplitudes output from the FSI and PM algorithms are practically identical and that the reflection signatures thus appear equally well.
Monostatic pursuit refers to the operating mode formed by two monostatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems that follow an identical orbit with a separation in a time of several seconds. The detected changes between SAR scenes with several seconds of time difference are most likely the changes caused by ground moving targets. Hence, this operating mode opens an opportunity to detect ground moving targets by SAR change detection methods. This article investigates this possibility to detect ground moving targets using change detection and to combine change detection and ground moving target indication (GMTI) for GMTI. In this combination, a GMTI method will help to classify the detected changes obtained with a change detection method. Some GMTI results are provided in the article based on the measurements in the monostatic pursuit mode with deployed targets, conducted by TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X in Sweden in early 2015.