• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.10 no.1 s.20
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• pp.1-7
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• 2004

RADARSAT is one of many possible data sources that can play an important role in marine surveillance including ship detection because radar sensors have the two primary advantages: all-weather and day or night imaging. However, atmospheric effects on SAR imaging can not be bypassed and any remote sensing image has various geometric distortions, In this study, radiometric and geometric calibrations for RADARSAT/SAT data are tried using SGX products georeferenced as level 1. Even comparison of the near vs. far range sections of the same images requires such calibration Radiometric calibration is performed by compensating for effects of local illuminated area and incidence angle on the local backscatter, Conversion method of the pixel DNs to beta nought and sigma nought is also investigated. Finally, automatic geometric calibration based on the 4 pixels from the header file is compared to a marine chart. The errors for latitude and longitude directions are 300m and 260m, respectively. It can be concluded that the error extent is acceptable for an application to open sea and can be calibrated using a ground control point.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.535-544
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• 2020

In synthetic aperture radar (SAR) based ship detection application, false alarms frequently occur due to various noises caused by the radar imaging process. Among them, radio frequency interference (RFI) and azimuth smearing produce substantial false alarms; the latter also yields longer length estimation of ships than the true length. These two noises are prominent at cross-polarization and relatively weak at co-polarization. However, in general, the cross-polarization data are suitable for ship detection, because the radar backscatter from background sea surface is much less in comparison with the co-polarization backscatter, i.e., higher ship-sea image contrast. In order to improve the ship detection accuracy further, the RFI and azimuth smearing need to be mitigated. In the present letter, Sentinel-1 VV- and VH-polarization intensity data are used to show a novel technique of removing these noises. In this method, median image intensities of noises and background sea surface are calculated to yield arithmetic tendency. A band-math formula is then designed to replace the intensities of noise pixels in VH-polarization with adjusted VV-polarization intensity pixels that are less affected by the noises. To verify the proposed method, the adaptive threshold method (ATM) with a sliding window was used for ship detection, and the results showed that the 74.39% of RFI false alarms are removed and 92.27% false alarms of azimuth smearing are removed.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.208-218
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• 2012

Numerical simulation technique has been developed to calculate microwave backscattering from water surface. The simulation plays a role of a substitute for experiments. Validation of the simulation was shown by comparing with experimental results. Water area observations by microwave radar have been simulated to evaluate algorithms and systems. Furthermore, the simulation can be used to understand microwave scattering mechanism on the water surface. The simulation has applied to the various methods for water area observations, and the utilizations of the simulation are introduced in this paper. In the case of fixed radar, we show following examples, 1. Radar image with a pulse Doppler radar, 2. Effect of microwave irradiation width and 3. River observation (Water level observation). In addition, another application (4.Synthetic aperture radar image) is also described. The details of the applications are as follows. 1. Radar image with a pulse Doppler radar: A new system for the sea surface observation is suggested by the simulation. A pulse Doppler radar is assumed to obtain radar images that display amplitude and frequency modulation of backscattered microwaves. The simulation results show that the radar images of the frequency modulation is useful to measure sea surface waves. 2. Effect of microwave irradiation width: It is reported (Rheem[2008]) that microwave irradiation width on the sea surface affects Doppler spectra measured by a CW (Continuous wave) Doppler radar. Therefore the relation between the microwave irradiation width and the Doppler spectra is evaluated numerically. We have shown the suitable condition for wave height estimation by a Doppler radar. 3. River observation (Water level observation): We have also evaluated algorithms to estimate water current and water level of river. The same algorithms to estimate sea surface current and sea surface level are applied to the river observation. The simulation is conducted to confirm the accuracy of the river observation by using a pulse Doppler radar. 4. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image: SAR images are helpful to observe the global sea surface. However, imaging mechanisms are complicated and validation of analytical algorithms by SAR images is quite difficult. In order to deal with the problems, SAR images in oceanic scenes are simulated.