• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.53 no.6
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• pp.7-16
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• 2011

This study discussed the applicability of satellite SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) imagery with regard to reservoir monitoring, and tried the extraction of reservoir storage from multi-temporal C-band RADARSAT-1 SAR backscattering images of Yedang and Goongpyeong agricultural reservoirs, acquired from May to October 2005. SAR technology has been advanced as a complementary and alternative approach to optical remote sensing and in-situ measurement. Water bodies in SAR imagery represent low brightness induced by low backscattering, and reservoir storage can be derived from the backscatter contrast with the level-area-volume relationship of each reservoir. The threshold segmentation over the routine preprocessing of SAR images such as speckle reduction and low-pass filtering concluded a significant correlation between the SAR-derived reservoir storage and the observation record in spite of the considerable disagreement. The result showed up critical limitations for adopting SAR data to reservoir monitoring as follows: the inappropriate specifications of SAR data, the unreliable rating curve of reservoir, the lack of climatic information such as wind and precipitation, the interruption of inside and neighboring land cover, and so on. Furthermore, better accuracy of SAR-based reservoir monitoring could be expected through different alternatives such as multi-sensor image fusion, water level measurement with altimeters or interferometry, etc.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.35 no.6_4
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• pp.1313-1318
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• 2019

The Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) has developed and operated a total of three KOMPSAT series(K-3, 3A and 5). The main purpose of satellite development is to utilize data obtained from satellites. In other words, continuous efforts should be made to improve the accuracy of data processing and expand the application areas. This special issue introduces pre-processing and application technologies based on optic and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors of KOMPSAT series. It is believed that more systematic research and development will be needed as follow-up KOMPSAT series and small satellites are under development.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.627-636
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• 2021

Although many studies on ship detection using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite images are being conducted around the world, there are still very few employing SAR microsatellites, as most of the microsatellites are optical satellites. Recently, the ICEYE and Capella Space have embarked on the development of microsatellites with SAR sensor, and similar projects are being initiated globally in line with the flow of the new space era [e.g., for the ICEYE: 18 satellites (~2021); Capella Space: 36 satellites (~2023); and the Coast Guard SAR: 32 satellites in the early development stage]. In preparation for these new systems, it is important to review the SAR microsatellite system and the recent advances in this technology. Accordingly, in this paper, the current status and characteristics of optical and SAR microsatellite constellation operation are described, and studies using them are investigated. In addition, based on the status and characteristics of the representative SAR microsatellites, specifically the ICEYE and Capella systems, methods for using SAR microsatellite data for ship detection applications are described. Our results confirm that the SAR microsatellites operate as a constellation and have the advantages of short revisit cycles and quick provision of high-resolution images. With this technology, we expect SAR microsatellites to contribute greatly to the monitoring a wide-area target vessel, in which the spatiotemporal resolution of the imagery is especially important.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.431-444
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• 2014

As applications of spaceborne SAR imagery are extended, there are increased demands for accurate registrations for better understanding and fusion of radar images. It becomes common to adopt multi-resolution SAR images to apply for wide area reconnaissance. Geometric correction of the SAR images can be performed by using satellite orbit and attitude information. However, the inherent errors of the SAR sensor's attitude and ground geographical data tend to cause geometric errors in the produced SAR image. These errors should be corrected when the SAR images are applied for multi-temporal analysis, change detection applications and image fusion with other sensor images. The undesirable ground registration errors can be corrected with respect to the true ground control points in order to produce complete SAR products. Speeded Up Robust Feature (SURF) technique is an efficient algorithm to extract ground control points from images but is considered to be inappropriate to apply to SAR images due to high speckle noises. In this paper, an attempt is made to apply SURF algorithm to SAR images for image registration and fusion. Matched points are extracted with respect to the varying parameters of Hessian and SURF matching thresholds, and the performance is analyzed by measuring the imaging matching accuracies. A number of performance measures concerning image registration are suggested to validate the use of SURF for spaceborne SAR images. Various simulations methodologies are suggested the validate the use of SURF for the geometric correction and image registrations and it is shown that a good choice of input parameters to the SURF algorithm should be made to apply for the spaceborne SAR images of moderate resolutions.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.56 no.8
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• pp.497-508
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• 2023

Agricultural reservoirs are crucial structures for water resources monitoring especially in Korea where the resources are seasonally unevenly distributed. Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, being utilized as tools for monitoring the reservoirs, have unique limitations in that optical sensors are sensitive to weather conditions and SAR sensors are sensitive to noises and multiple scattering over dense vegetations. In this study, we tried to improve water body detection accuracy through optical-SAR data fusion, and quantitatively analyze the complementary effects. We first detected water bodies at Edong, Cheontae reservoir using the Compact Advanced Satellite 500(CAS500), Kompsat-3/3A, and Sentinel-2 derived Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), and SAR backscattering coefficient from Sentinel-1 by K-means clustering technique. After that, the improvements in accuracies were analyzed by applying K-means clustering to the 2-D grid space consists of NDWI and SAR. Kompsat-3/3A was found to have the best accuracy (0.98 at both reservoirs), followed by Sentinel-2(0.83 at Edong, 0.97 at Cheontae), Sentinel-1(both 0.93), and CAS500(0.69, 0.78). By applying K-means clustering to the 2-D space at Cheontae reservoir, accuracy of CAS500 was improved around 22%(resulting accuracy: 0.95) with improve in precision (85%) and degradation in recall (14%). Precision of Kompsat-3A (Sentinel-2) was improved 3%(5%), and recall was degraded 4%(7%). More precise water resources monitoring is expected to be possible with developments of high-resolution SAR satellites including CAS500-5, developments of image fusion and water body detection techniques.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.166-172
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• 2018

To develop and evaluate the real-time SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) motion measurement system, true antenna phase center(APC) positions during SAT(Synthetic Aperture Time) are needed. In this paper, CDGPS(Carrier phase Differential Global Positioning System) post processing method is proposed to get the true APC position for spotlight SAR image formation. The CDGPS position is smoothed to remove high frequency noise which exists inherently in the carrier phase measurement. This paper shows smoothed CDGPS data is enough to provide the true APC for high-quality SAR image formation through motion measurement result, phase error estimation and IRF(Impulse Response Function) analysis.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.101-110
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• 2015

Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) is affected by various noise source such as atmospheric artifact, orbital error, processing noise etc.. Especially, one of the dominant noise source for long-wave SAR system, such as ALOS PALSAR (L-band SAR satellite) is the ionosphere effect because phase delays on radar pulse through the ionosphere are proportional to the radar wavelength. To avoid misinterpret of phase signal in the interferogram, it is necessary to detect and correct ionospheric errors. Recently, a MAI (Multipler Aperture SAR Interferometry) based ionospheric correction method has been proposed and considered one of the effective method to reduce phase errors by ionospheric effect. In this paper, we introduce the MAI-based method for ionospheric correction. Moreover we propose an efficient method that apply the method over non-coherent area using directional filter. Finally, we apply the proposed method to the ALOS PALSAR pairs, which include the west sea coast region in Korea. A polynomial fitting method, which is frequently adopted in InSAR processing, has been applied for the mitigation of phase distortion by the orbital error. However, the interferogram still has low frequency of Sin pattern along the azimuth direction. In contrast, after we applied the proposed method for ionospheric correction, the low frequency pattern is mitigated and the profile results has stable phase variation values within ${\pm}1rad$. Our results show that this method provides a promising way to correct orbital and ionospheric artifact and would be important technique to improve the accuracy and the availability for L-band or P-band systems.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2021.06a
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• pp.117-117
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• 2021

본 연구에서는 Sentinel-1A/B C-band SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) 위성영상을 기반으로 인공신경망(Artificial Neural Network, ANN) 모형을 활용해 금강 유역 상류 40×50 km² 면적에 대한 토양수분을 산정하였다. 10 m 공간 해상도의 Sentinel-1A/B SAR 영상은 8일 간격으로 2015년부터 2019년까지 5년 동안 구축하였고, SNAP(SentiNel Application Platform)을 통해 기하 보정, 방사 보정 및 잡음(Noise) 보정을 수행하고 VV 및 VH 편파 후방산란계수로 변환하였다. ANN 모형 검증자료로 TDR(Time Domain Reflectometry)로 측정된 9개 지점의 실측 토양수분 자료를 구축하였으며, 수문학적 개념인 선행강우를 고려하기 위해 동지점에 대한 강수량 자료를 구축하였다. ANN은 각 지점에 해당하는 토양 속성별로 모델링하고, 전체 기간 및 계절별로 나누어 모의하였으며, 전체 자료의 60%와 40%를 각각 훈련 및 테스트 데이터로 사용하였다. 산정된 토양수분은 상관계수(Correlation Coefficient, R)와 평균제곱근오차(Root Mean Square Error, RMSE)를 활용하여 검증을 수행할 예정이다.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.192.1-192.1
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• 2012

영상레이더 (SAR: Synthetic Aperture Radar) 혹은 통신 안테나/탑재체를 장착한 위성은 원하는 주파수 대역의 운용을 위해 대형 안테나 구조물 장착이 필수적이다. 이러한 대형 구조물은 일체형으로 제작되어 위성체에 접속되었을 때, 요구 무게 및 점유하는 부피가 매우 큰 특징을 지닌다. 따라서, 대형 안테나 구조물의 중량으로 인해 발사비 증가가 불가피하며, 페어링 내부의 허용된 공간에 안테나 크기는 큰 제약적 요인이 된다. 그리고, 전개식이어도, 전개후 질량 관성이 큰 구조물이 된다. 위성체의 발사 비용과 직결되는 안테나의 경량화를 위한 많은 기술이 연구되고 있다. 특히, 접이식 팽창형 안테나는 반사체의 유연한 메쉬 구조 및 경량 지지구조물로 안테나의 무게를 줄이고 수납 효율을 향상시킨다. 또한, 전개 후 안테나의 목적한 기능을 충분히 보장함과 동시에 질량 관성이 작은 구조물에 의한 위성의 기동성을 극대화할 수 있다. 국내에서도 전천후 지상관측감시 및 통신 안테나의 필요성 증대에 따라 초경량 전개형 안테나 개발의 필요성이 크게 대두되고 있으나, 현재까지는 관련 기술개발 사례가 전무한 실정으로 국내 독자적 기술 확보가 시급한 실정이다.