• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.26-67
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• 2020

Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) is able to photograph the earth's surface regardless of weather conditions, day and night. Because of its possibility to search for hydrological factors such as soil moisture and groundwater, and its importance is gradually increasing in the field of water resources. SAR began to be mounted on satellites in the 1970s, and about 15 or more satellites were launched as of 2020, which around 10 satellites will be launched within the next 5 years. Recently, various types of SAR technologies such as enhancement of observation width and resolution, multiple polarization and multiple frequencies, and diversification of observation angles were being developed and utilized. In this paper, a brief history of the SAR system, as well as studies for estimating soil moisture and hydrological components were investigated. Up to now hydrological components that can be estimated using SAR satellites include soil moisture, subsurface groundwater discharge, precipitation, snow cover area, leaf area index(LAI), and normalized difference vegetation index(NDVI) and among them, soil moisture is being studied in 17 countries in South Korea, North America, Europe, and India by using the physical model, the IEM(Integral Equation Model) and the artificial intelligence-based ANN(Artificial Neural Network). RADARSAT-1, ENVISAT, ASAR, and ERS-1/2 were the most widely used satellite, but the operation has ended, and utilization of RADARSAT-2, Sentinel-1, and SMAP, which are currently in operation, is gradually increasing. Since Korea is developing a medium-sized satellite for water resources and water disasters equipped with C-band SAR with the goal of launching in 2025, various hydrological components estimation researches using SAR are expected to be active.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.18 no.8
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• pp.997-1004
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• 2007

High resolution synthetic aperture radar image could be sensitive to the various parameters of the payload, platform, and ground system. In this paper, a parameter based SAR simulator is presented for two-dimensional image formation and image quality analysis. Functional modules are implemented by Matalb code and GUI for the flexibility and expandability. Main function of this simulator includes the SAR input signal generation, range-doppler algorithm(RDA) based SAR image formation, and the SAR image quality analysis which is relevant to the SAR system design parameters. This simulator can effectively be used for the SAR image quality performance evaluation, which can be applicable to the airborne as well as spaceborne SAR system design and analysis.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.275-281
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• 2019

A synthetic aperture radar(SAR) satellite is more effective than an optical satellite for target analysis because an SAR satellite can provide two-dimensional electromagnetic scattering distribution of a target during all-weather and day-and-night operations. To conduct target analysis while considering the earth observation interval of an SAR satellite, observing a specific area as wide as possible would be advantageous. However, wider the observation area, worse is the resolution of the associated SAR satellite image. Although conventional methods for improving the resolution of radar images can be employed for addressing this issue, few studies have been conducted for improving the resolution of SAR satellite images and analyzing the performance. Hence, in this study, the applicability of conventional methods to SAR satellite images is investigated. SAR target detection was first applied to Korea Multipurpose Satellite-5(KOMPSAT-5) SAR images provided by Korea Aerospace Research Institute for extracting target responses. Extrapolation, RELAX, and MUSIC algorithms were subsequently applied to the target responses for improving the resolution, and the corresponding performance was thereby analyzed.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.104-123
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• 2001

Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) can provide radar imagery in all weather, day and night situations. Recently SAR system consisted of several imaging modes, has been used for not only military purpose, but also commercial and scientific applications. This paper firstly reviews spaceborne SAR theory, specially scansar principle, and secondly the theories and the design procedures of system performance analysis in the scansar mode, which are different from the ones in the conventional stripmap mode. Based on the SAR-related knowledge, it lastly derives the results of performance analysis in wide swath mode using the scansar technique at the design phase. It shows that these results can meet the system requirements as given the customer. In future, they will continuously be updated using the real measurement data, in connection with the development of a spaceborne SAR system.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.392-400
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• 2021

Unlike optical equipment, SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) has the advantage of obtaining images in all weather, and object detection in SAR images is an important issue. Generally, deep learning-based object detection was mainly performed in real-valued network using only amplitude of SAR image. Since the SAR image is complex data consist of amplitude and phase data, a complex-valued network is required. In this paper, a complex-valued ResNet network is proposed. SAR image object detection was performed by combining the ROI transformer detector specialized for aerial image detection and the proposed complex-valued ResNet. It was confirmed that higher accuracy was obtained in complex-valued network than in existing real-valued network.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.366-374
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• 2018

In cases of airborne equipped with SAR, because the occurrence of motion is inevitable, it is necessary to apply autofocus techniques to SAR images to improve the image performance degradations caused by residual errors. Herein, a robust autofocus algorithm based on the minimum entropy criteria is proposed for the real SAR data in the spotlight mode. The convergence condition of the phase error estimation is checked at every iteration and if it is violated, the size of the phase error estimation is adjusted to the convergence condition. The real SAR raw data is used to demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed algorithm.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.32 no.1D
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• pp.89-94
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• 2012

The RFM (Rational Function Model), as an alternative to physical sensor models has been widely used for photogrammetric processing of high resolution optical satellite imagery. However, the application of RF modeling to the SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) is very limited. In this paper, stereo radargrammetric processing of TerraSAR-X stereo pairs with RFM is implemented and analyzed. The investigation has shown that the accuracy of TerraSAR-X DSM is similar to that of the commercial S/W product. Finally, it is demonstrated that RFM is effective and feasible in the application to the radargrammetric SAR image processing.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.186-194
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• 2017

In this paper, we analyze the main performance of satellite's Synthetic Aperture Radar system for high resolution and wide swath. We have used the radiation pattern of reflector antenna with array feed and comparison between the conventional ScanSAR mode and SweepSAR mode has been carried out. The SweepSAR mode is a high-resolution wide-swath mode that transmits beams over a wide range and receives echo signals through sequential beamforming based on SCORE(SCan On REceive). In this paper, we analyzed the operating principle and characteristics of satellite's SweepSAR mode and simulate system performances. In addition, in order to increase the utilization of image, performances analysis for multiple frequency bands(C-band, X-band) has been considered.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.25-31
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• 2011

Precise control of antenna position is very critical in ArcSAR system which uses an arc-rail as a platform for the antenna movement instead of linear rail. In order to minimize the antenna positional error, we improved the motion driving system and applied a newly developed motion control S/W which utilizes the real time antenna position information from magnetic linear scale and encoder. The experimental results showed that the rotational RMS error was reduced to $0.0062^{\circ}$ from $0.0432^{\circ}$. In terms of antenna positional RMS error for the arm length of 3m, it was reduced to 0.324mm from 2.262mm. It is expected that the ArcSAR system can be used to monitor the sub-millimetric displacement of terrain and structural targets.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.61-71
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• 1999

Several physical phenomena on the sea surface are analyzed from SAR images of South Sea areas, Korea. Strong wave patterns propagating in southerly direction are seen in ERS-1 SAR image on October 11, 1994, and a wave directional spectrum is calculated from this image using the SAR modulation transfer function. RADARSAT SAR image of August 15, 1996 reveals internal waves in northern coastal waters of Cheju Island. Analysis indicates that the internal waves may have been generated by the tidal currents traveling over the shallow bottom of the stratified water in the summer during the tidal changeovers fro ebb to flood and shows patterns of trains of solitons. RADARSAT SAR image taken 3 days after the oil spill accident near Goeje Isalnd on April 3, 1997 detects distinct oil slicks from the accident area but also shows slicks near the coast caused by wind sheltering of coastal mountains and chemical-biological activities.