• 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 the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.335-343
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• 2024

Real-time target signal processing techniques for FMCW LiDAR are described in this paper. FMCW LiDAR is gaining attention as the next-generation LiDAR for self-driving cars because of its detection robustness even in adverse environmental conditions such as rain, snow and fog etc. in addition to its long range measurement capability. The hardware architecture which is required for high-speed data acquisition, data transfer, and parallel signal processing for frequency-domain signal processing is described in this article. Fourier transformation of the acquired time-domain signal is implemented on FPGA in real time. The paper also details the C-FAR algorithm for ensuring robust target detection from the transformed target spectrum. This paper elaborates on enhancing frequency measurement resolution from the target spectrum and converting them into range and velocity data. The 3D image was generated and displayed using the 2D scanner position and target distance data. Real-time target signal processing and high-resolution image acquisition capability of FMCW LiDAR by using the proposed parallel signal processing algorithms based on FPGA architecture are verified in this paper.