• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.397-400
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• 2004

Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) is an active micro­wave instrument that performs high-resolution observation under almost all weather conditions. Although there are many advantages of SAR instrument, many complicated steps are involved in order to generate SAR image products. Many research and algorithms have been proposed to process radar signal and to increase the quality of SAR products. However, it is hard to find research which compare the quality of SAR products generated with different algorithms and processing methods. In our previous research, a SAR processing s/w was developed for a ground station. In addition, quality assessment procedures and their test parameters inside a SAR processor was proposed. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the quality of SAR images generated from the developed SAR processing s/w. However, If there are no direct measurements such as radar reflector or scattering field measurement values it is difficult to compare SAR images generated with different methods. An alternative procedures and parameters for SAR image quality evaluation are presented and the problems involved in the comparison methods are discussed. Experiments based on real data have been conducted to evaluate and analyze quality of SAR images.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.188-194
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• 2010

In this paper, the typical Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image quality parameters and analysis method are defined, and the SAR image analysis tool is presented for SAR image evaluation. The structure of the developed SAR image analysis tool consists of four key modules; point target analysis (PTA) module, distributed target analysis (DTA) module, ambiguity analysis (AMA) module, and NESZ analysis (NESZA) module. The developed tool is able to extract the various SAR system parameters from standard SAR product format files. Based on these extracted system parameters, typical SAR image quality parameters are derived from SAR image data.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.628-630
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• 2003

Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) is an active microwave instrument that performs high-resolution observation under almost all weather condition. Research and algorithms have been proposed to process radar signal and to increase the quality of SAR products. In fact, many complicated steps are involved in order to generate a SAR image product. The purpose of this paper is to derive quality assessment procedures and define important test parameters in each procedure inside a SAR processor. Thus those test parameter values indicate the quality of SAR image products and verify the processor's performance. Moreover, required procedures to correct and handle errors which are indicated during the assessment are also presented.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.445-458
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• 2008

Image chain analysis of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite is one of the primary activities for satellite design because SAR image quality depends on spacecraft bus performance as well as SAR payload. Especially, satellite pointing and stability error make worst effect on the original SAR image quality which is implemented by SAR payload design. In this research, Image chain analysis S/W was developed in order to analyze the SAR image quality degradation due to satellite pointing and stability error. This S/W consists of orbit model, attitude control model, SAR payload model, clutter model, and SAR processor. SAR raw data, which includes total 25 point targets in the scene of $5km{\times}5km$ swath width, was generated and then processed for analysis. High resolution mode (spotlight), of which resolution is 1m, was applied. The results of image chain analysis show that radiometric accuracy is the most degraded due to the pointing error. Therefore, the successful design of attitude control subsystem in spacecraft bus for enhancing the pointing accuracy is most important for image quality.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.183-194
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• 2011

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is widely used because of high resolution imaging capability in all weather and day/night condition. In this paper development of Spotlight SAR simulator is proposed for image quality analysis. Proposed SAR simulator is based on the SAR system design parameters so that SAR image performance can be expected which is essential throughout the full system development procedure from the initial concept design stage to the final in-flight calibration and validation stage. The raw data of ideal point target is first generated by taking account of the flight and imaging geometry and the various SAR system design parameters, and the Spotlight image formation algorithm is implemented in order to obtain the point target response. Finally the image quality of the generated raw data is analyzed in terms of spatial resolution, peak to sidelobe ratio and integrated sidelobe ratio.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.30 no.6_1
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• pp.519-528
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• 2012

It was pointed out that the terrain distortion of SAR image is even worse than that of optical image although SAR imagery has the advantages of being independent of solar illumination and weather conditions. It is thus necessary to correct terrain distortion in SAR image for various application areas to integrate SAR and optical image information. There has to be a clear evaluation of terrain correction of high resolution SAR image according to the quality of DEM because the DEM of study site is generally used in the process of terrain correction. To achieve this issue, this paper compared the effects of quality of Digital Elevation Model(DEM) in the process of terrain correction of high resolution SAR images, using the DEM produced from 1:5000 topographic contour maps, LiDAR DEM, ASTER GDEM, SRTM DEM. We used TerraSAR-X and Cosmo-SkyMed, as the test data set, which are constructed on the same X-band SAR system as KOMPSAT-5. In order to evaluate quantitatively the correction results, we conducted comparative evaluation with the KOMPSAT-2 ortho image of the same region. The evaluation results showed that the DEM produced from 1:5000 topographic contour maps achieved successful results in the terrain correction of SAR image compared with the other DEM data, and the widely used SRTM DEM data in various applications was not suitable for the terrain correction of high resolution SAR images.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.26 no.11
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• pp.1027-1030
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• 2015

In the airborne SAR, the motion errors induced by atmospheric turbulence decrease the resolution and increase the sidelobes. If the sidelobes are not properly compensated, the image quality is degraded. Thus, in this paper, we have introduced the sidelobe reduction method to increase the image quality. After we calculate the scene center based on the estimated squint angle for the flight path partitioned by the subaperture technique, we perform the motion compensation for the scene center. Then, after we perform the recursive sidelobe reduction for the region of interest in the reconstructed SAR image, we extend it for the full image.

• Journal of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.175-181
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• 2019

This paper suggests a velocity integration algorithm for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) motion measurement to reduce discontinuity of range error. When using position data from Embedded GPS/INS (EGI) to form SAR image, the discontinuity of the data degrades SAR image quality. In this paper, to reduce the discontinuity of EGI position data, EGI velocity integration is suggested which obtains navigation solution by integrating velocity data from EGI. Simulation shows that the method improves SAR image quality by reducing the discontinuity of range error. INS is a similar algorithm to EGI velocity integration in the way that it also obtains navigation solution by integrating velocity measured by IMU. Comparing INS and EGI velocity integration according to grades of IMU and GPS, EGI velocity integration is more suitable for the real system. Through this, EGI velocity integration is suggested, which improves SAR image quality more than existing algorithms.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.319-326
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• 2017

SAR (Synthetic aperture radar) images are less affected by the weather compared to optical images and can be obtained at any time of the day. Therefore, SAR images are being actively utilized for military applications and natural disasters. However, because SAR data are in grayscale, it is difficult to perform visual analysis and to decipher details. In this study, we propose a color mapping method using RF (random forest) regression for enhancing the visual decipherability of SAR images. COSMO-SkyMed 2 and WorldView-3 images were obtained for the same area and RF regression was used to establish color configurations for performing color mapping. The results were compared with image fusion, a traditional color mapping method. The UIQI (universal image quality index), the SSIM (structural similarity) index, and CC (correlation coefficients) were used to evaluate the image quality. The color-mapped image based on the RF regression had a significantly higher quality than the images derived from the other methods. From the experimental result, the use of color mapping based on the RF regression for SAR images was confirmed.