• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.46-54
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• 2020

Oil spill accidents at sea result in a wide range of damages, including the destruction of ocean environments and ecosystems, as well as human illnesses by the generation of harmful gases caused by phase changes in crude oil. When an oil spill occurs, an immediate initial action should be performed to minimize the potential damage. Existing studies have attempted to identify crude oil spillage by calculating the crude oil spill range using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite images. However, SAR cannot capture rapidly evolving events because of its low acquisition frequency. Herein, an algorithm for estimating an oil spill area from an image obtained using a digital camera is proposed. Noise that may occur in the image when it is captured is first eliminated by preprocessing, and then the image is analyzed. After analyzing the characteristics of the digital image, a strategy to binarize an image using the color, saturation, or lightness contained in it is adopted. It is found that the oil spill area can be readily estimated from a digital image, allowing for a faster analysis than any conventional method. The usefulness of the oil spill area measurement was confirmed by applying the developed algorithm to various oil spill images.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.575-585
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• 2011

The effect of wavelet pair choice in the compression of the satellite images is studied. There is a trade-off between compression rate and perception quality. The encoding ratio is used to express the compression rate, and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) is also used for the perceptional performance. The PSNR and the encoding ratio are not matched well for the images with various wavelet pairs, but the tendency is remarkable. It is hard to find the pattern of PSNR for sampled images. On the other hand, there is a pattern of the variation range of the encoding ratio for each image. The satellite images have larger values of the encoding ratio than those of nature images (close range images). Depending on the wavelet pairs, the PSNR and the encoding ratio vary as much as 13.2 to 21.6% and 16.8 to 45.5%, respectively for each image. For Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images the encoding ratio varies from 16 to 20% while for the nature images it varies more than 40% depending on the choice of wavelet pairs. The choice of wavelet for the compression affects the nature images more than the satellite images. With the indices such as the PSNR and the encoding ratio, the satellite images are less sensitive to the choice of wavelet pairs. A new index, energy concentration ratio (ECR) is proposed to investigate the effect of wavelet choice on the satellite image compression. It also shows that the satellite images are less sensitive than the nature images. Nevertheless, the effect of wavelet choice on the satellite image compression varies at least 10% for all three kinds of indices. However, the important of choice of wavelet pairs cannot be ignored.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.33 no.6_3
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• pp.1215-1221
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• 2017

SeNtinel's Application Platform (SNAP) is an open source software developed by the European Space Agency and consists of several toolboxes that process data from Sentinel satellite series, including SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and optical satellites. Among them, S1TBX (Sentinel-1 ToolBoX)is mainly used to process Sentinel-1A/BSAR images and interferometric techniques. It provides flowchart processing method such as Graph Builder, and has convenient functions including automatic downloading of DEM (Digital Elevation Model) and image mosaicking. Therefore, if computer memory is sufficient, InSAR (Interferometric SAR) and DInSAR (Differential InSAR) perform smoothly and are widely used recently in the world through rapid upgrades. S1TBX also includes existing SAR data processing functions, and since version 5, the processing capability of KOMPSAT-5 has been added. This paper shows an example of processing the interference technique of KOMPSAT-5 SAR image using S1TBX of SNAP. In the open mine of Tavan Tolgoi in Mongolia, the difference between DEM obtained in KOMPSAT-5 in 2015 and SRTM 1sec DEM obtained in 2000 was analyzed. It was found that the maximum depth of 130 meters was excavated and the height of the accumulated ore is over 70 meters during 15 years. Tidal and topographic InSAR signals were observed in the glacier area near Jangbogo Antarctic Research Station, but SNAP was not able to treat it due to orbit error and DEM error. In addition, several DInSAR images were made in the Iraqi desert region, but many lines appearing in systematic errors were found on coherence images. Stacking for StaMPS application was not possible due to orbit error or program bug. It is expected that SNAP can resolve the problem owing to a surge in users and a very fast upgrade of the software.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.34 no.6_3
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• pp.1415-1425
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• 2018

Kompsat-5 is the first Earth Observation Satellite which is equipped with an SAR in Korea. SAR images are generated by receiving signals reflected from an object by microwaves emitted from a SAR antenna. Because the wavelengths of microwaves are longer than the size of particles in the atmosphere, it can penetrate clouds and fog, and high-resolution images can be obtained without distinction between day and night. However, there is no color information in SAR images. To overcome these limitations of SAR images, colorization of SAR images using Cycle GAN, a deep learning model developed for domain translation, was conducted. Training of Cycle GAN is unstable due to the unsupervised learning based on unpaired dataset. Therefore, we proposed MS Cycle GAN applying multi-scale discriminator to solve the training instability of Cycle GAN and to improve the performance of colorization in this paper. To compare colorization performance of MS Cycle GAN and Cycle GAN, generated images by both models were compared qualitatively and quantitatively. Training Cycle GAN with multi-scale discriminator shows the losses of generators and discriminators are significantly reduced compared to the conventional Cycle GAN, and we identified that generated images by MS Cycle GAN are well-matched with the characteristics of regions such as leaves, rivers, and land.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.421-430
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• 2003

The extraction technique for Doppler information(Doppler centroid frequency(f$_{dc}$) and it's rate(f$_{r}$) is very important to make an image from the radar echo signal data. Clutterlock and auto-focusing techniques have been widely used to extract accurate Doppler information. But both techniques are not easy to implement in SAR processor and need quite lots of time to calculate accurate f$_{dc}$ and f$_{r}$ because they are generally based on echo signal data only. In this paper we suggest hybrid method for Doppler extraction using both of echo signal data and orbital and attitude information of satellite. In this method CDE(Correlation Doppler Estimation) technique is only used to estimate exact modular f$_{dc}$ using received echo signal data and rest of other algorithms are based on simple mathematical model of geometry between satellite and ground targets as well as the Doppler frequency ambiguity resolving problem. The experimental results using Radarsat-1 signal data shows that the proposed method can be effectively used for the extraction of Doppler information.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.475-491
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• 2021

With the recent increase in available high-resolution (< ~1 m) satellite SAR images, the demand for precise registration of SAR images is increasing in various fields including change detection. The registration between high-resolution SAR images acquired in different look angle is difficult due to speckle noise and geometric distortion caused by the characteristics of SAR images. In this study, registration is performed in two stages, coarse and fine, using the x-band SAR data imaged at staring spotlight mode of TerraSAR-X. For the coarse registration, a method combining the adaptive sampling method and SAR-SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) is applied, and three rigid methods (NCC: Normalized Cross Correlation, Phase Congruency-NCC, MI: Mutual Information) and one non-rigid (Gefolki: Geoscience extended Flow Optical Flow Lucas-Kanade Iterative), for the fine registration stage, was performed for performance comparison. The results were compared by using RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) and FSIM (Feature Similarity) index, and all rigid models showed poor results in all image combinations. It is confirmed that the rigid models have a large registration error in the rugged terrain area. As a result of applying the Gefolki algorithm, it was confirmed that the RMSE of Gefolki showed the best result as a 1~3 pixels, and the FSIM index also obtained a higher value than 0.02~0.03 compared to other rigid methods. It was confirmed that the mis-registration due to terrain effect could be sufficiently reduced by the Gefolki algorithm.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.163-168
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• 2008

Ship detection from satellite remote sensing is a crucial application for global monitoring for the purpose of protecting the marine environment and ensuring marine security. It permits to monitor sea traffic including fisheries, and to associate ships with oil discharge. An automatic ship detection approach for RADARSAT Fine Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image is described and assessed using in situ ship validation information collected during field experiments conducted on August 6, 2004. Ship detection algorithms developed here consist of five stages: calibration, land masking, prescreening, point positioning, and discrimination. The fine image was acquired of Ulsan Port, located in southeast Korea, and during the acquisition, wind speeds between 0 m/s and 0.4 m/s were reported. The detection approach is applied to anchoring ships in the anchorage area of the port and its results are compared with validation data based on Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) radar. Our analysis for anchoring ships, above 68 m in length (LOA), indicates a 100% ship detection rate for the RADARSAT single beam mode. It is shown that the ship detection performance of SAR for smaller ships like barge could be higher than the land-based radar. The proposed method is also applied to estimate the ship's dimensions of length and breadth from SAR radar cross section(RCS), but those values were comparatively higher than the actual sizes because of layover and shadow effects of SAR.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Navigation and Port Research Conference
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• v.1
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• pp.187-194
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• 2006

Recently satellite SAR techniques have become essential observation tools for various ocean phenomena such as wind, wave, and current. The CMOD4 and CMOD-IFR2 models are used to calculate the magnitude of wind at SAR resolution with no directional information. Combination of the wave-SAR spectrum analysis and the inter-look cross-spectra techniques provides amplitude and direction of the ocean wave over a square-km sized imagette, The Doppler shift measurement of SAR image yields surface speed of the ocean current along the rador looking direction, again at imagette resolution. In this paper we report the development of a SAR Ocean processor (SOP) incorporating all of these techniques. We have applied the SOP to several RADARSAT-1 images of the coast of Korean peninsula and compared the results with oceanographic data, which showed reliability of spaceborne SAR-based oceanographic research.

• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.31 no.1 s.117
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• pp.35-42
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• 2007

Recently satellite SAR techniques have become essential observation tools for various ocean phenomena such as wind, wave, and current. The CMOD4 and CMOD-IFR2 models are used to calculate the magnitude of wind at SAR resolution with no directional information. Combination of the wave-SAR spectrum analysis and the inter-look cross-spectra techniques provides amplitude and direction of the ocean wave over a square-km sized imagette, The Doppler shift measurement of SAR image yields surface speed of the ocean current along the radar looking direction, again at imagette resolution. In this paper we report the development of a SAR Ocean processor(SOP) incorporating all of these techniques. We have applied the SOP to several RADARSAT-1 images of the coast of Korean peninsula and compared the results with oceanographic data, which showed reliability of spaceborne SAR-based oceanographic research.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• v.2
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• pp.820-823
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• 2006

Nonlinear internal waves (NLIW) were studied as a unusual phenomena in the ocean decades ago. As the quality, quantity and variety of satellite images improve over decades, it is founded that NLIW is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Over the continental shelf of northern South China Sea (SCS), both optical and microwave images show that there are trains of NLIW packets near Dongsha Atoll (20.7N, 116.8E). Each packet contains several NLIW fronts. These NLIW packets are nearly parallel to each other and they are refracted, reflected or diffracted by the change of ocean bottom topography. Based on Korteweg de Vries (KdV) theory and the assumption that the bright/dark lines in the satellite images are centers of convergence/divergence of NLIW fronts, one may (1) sort NLIW packets in the same satellite image into groups of the same source, but generated at different tidal cycles, (2) relate NLIW packets in consecutive satellite images of one day apart, (3) locating faint signals of NLIW fronts in a satellite image. The NLIWs travel more than 100 km/day near Dongsha Atoll, with higher speed in deeper water. The bias and standard deviation of predicted location of NLIW front from its true location is about 1% and 5.1%, respectively.