Extraction of Common GCPs from JERS-1 SAR Imagery

The first step in change detection in any SAR monitoring, including SAR interferometry, is the co-registration of the images. CCPs (Ground Control Points) for co-registration are usually detected manually, but for qualitative analyses of enormous volumes of data, some automation of the process will become necessary. An automated determination of common CCPs for the same path/row data is especially desirable. We selected the intersections of linear features as the candidates of common GCPs Very bright point targets, which are commonly used as GCPs, have the drawback of appearing and disappearing depending on the conditions of the observation. But in the case of linear features, some detailed elements may appear differently in some case, but the overall line-likeness will remain. In this study, we selected 18 common GCPs for a single-look JERS-1 SAR image of Omaezaki area in central Japan. Although the GCPs in the first image had to be selected either interactively or semi-automatically, the same GCPs in all other images were successively detected automatically using a tiny sub-image around each GCP and a dilated mask of each linear feature in the first image as the reference data.