• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• v.1
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• pp.376-379
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• 2006

A numerous oil slicks of natural origin were revealed in the southwest (SW) part of Caspian Sea by the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images acquired by Envisat satellite in 2003-2004. On the basis of computer processing, visual analysis of SAR images and comparisons with bathymetry, geophysical and seismic data in geographic information system (GIS), a link between these slicks and unloading of liquid hydrocarbons in the SW Caspian is established. Oil slicks are basically concentrated above domes of local geological formations of the sedimentary cover. In total more than 90 seeps and mud volcanoes having a repeating regime and representing an active type were identified; they are distributed across the SW Azerbaijan and West Iranian sectors. Periodical occurrence of slicks can reflect alternation of mud volcanism pulses forced by intensive seismicity with the quiet periods. Seepage rate of oil in the SW part of the Caspian Sea according to SAR images is estimated to be up to 16,000 metric tons per year. The importance of unloading of oils on hydrochemistry and ecological conditions of the Caspian Sea is demonstrated. Conclusion is done that the Envisat SAR to be an excellent tool for studying oil seeps through observation oil slicks floating on the sea surface.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_1
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• pp.599-608
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• 2023

The increasing interest in soil moisture data using satellite data for applications of hydrology, meteorology, and agriculture has led to the development of methods for generating soil moisture maps of variable resolution. This study demonstrated the capability of generating soil moisture maps using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data provided by Google Earth Engine (GEE). The soil moisture map was derived using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image and optical image. SAR data provided by the Sentinel-1 analysis ready data in GEE was applied with normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) based on Sentinel-2 and Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI)-based Land Cover map. This study produced a soil moisture map in the research area of Victoria, Australia and compared it with field measurements obtained from a previous study. As for the validation of the applied method's result accuracy, the comparative experimental results showed a meaningful range of consistency as 4-10%p between the values obtained using the algorithm applied in this study and the field-based ones, and they also showed very high consistency with satellite-based soil moisture data as 0.5-2%p. Therefore, public open data provided by GEE and the algorithm applied in this study can be used for high-resolution soil moisture mapping to represent regional land surface characteristics.

• Korean Journal of Geomatics
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.33-41
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• 2003

Every year, several typhoons hit the Korean peninsula and cause severe damage. For the prevention and accurate estimation of these damages, real time or almost real time flood information is essential. Because of weather conditions, images taken by optic sensors or LIDAR are sometimes not appropriate for an accurate estimation of water areas during typhoon. In this case SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images which are independent of weather condition can be useful for the estimation of flood areas. To get detailed information about floods from satellite imagery, accurate classification of water areas is the most important step. A commonly- and widely-used classification methods is the ML(Maximum Likelihood) method which assumes that the distribution of brightness values of the images follows a Gaussian distribution. The distribution of brightness values of the SAR image, however, usually does not follow a Gaussian distribution. For this reason, in this study the ANN (Artificial Neural Networks) method independent of the statistical characteristics of images is applied to the SAR imagery. RADARS A TSAR images are primarily used for extraction of water areas, and DEM (Digital Elevation Model) is used as supplementary data to evaluate the ground undulation effect. Water areas are also extracted from KOMPSAT image achieved by optic sensors for comparison purpose. Both ANN and ML methods are applied to flat and mountainous areas to extract water areas. The estimated areas from satellite imagery are compared with those of manually extracted results. As a result, the ANN classifier performs better than the ML method when only the SAR image was used as input data, except for mountainous areas. When DEM was used as supplementary data for classification of SAR images, there was a 5.64% accuracy improvement for mountainous area, and a similar result of 0.24% accuracy improvement for flat areas using artificial neural networks.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2019.05a
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• pp.152-152
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• 2019

This study demonstrates a novel approach of remotely sensed estimates of stream flow at fifteen hydrological station in the Han River Basin, Korea. Multi-temporal data of the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 SAR satellite from 19 January, 2015 to 25 August, 2018 is used to develop and validate the flow estimation model for each station. The flow estimation model is based on a power law relationship established between the remotely sensed surface area of water at a selected reach of the stream and the observed discharge. The satellite images were pre-processed for thermal noise, radiometric, speckle and terrain correction. The difference in SAR image brightness caused by the differences in SAR satellite look angle and atmospheric condition are corrected using the histogram matching technique. Selective area filtering is applied to identify the extent of the selected stream reach where the change in water surface area is highly sensitive to the change in stream discharge. Following this, an iterative procedure called the Optimum Threshold Classification Algorithm (OTC) is applied to the multi-temporal selective areas to extract a series of water surface areas. It is observed that the extracted water surface area and the stream discharge are related by the power law equation. A strong correlation coefficient ranging from 0.68 to 0.98 (mean=0.89) was observed for thirteen hydrological stations, while at two stations the relationship was highly affected by the hydraulic structures such as dam. It is further identified that the availability of remotely sensed data for a range of discharge conditions and the geometric properties of the selected stream reach such as the stream width and side slope influence the accuracy of the flow estimation model.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.507-520
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• 2011

Conventional radar altimeter system measured directly the distance between the satellite and the ocean surface and frequently used by aircraft for approach and landing. The radar altimeter is good at flat surface like sea whereas it is difficult to determine precise three dimensional ground coordinates because the ground surface, unlike ocean, is very indented. To overcome this drawback of the radar altimeter, we have developed and validated the interferometric radar altimeter signal processing which is combined with new synthetic aperture and interferometric signal processing algorithm to extract precise three-dimensional ground coordinates. The proposed algorithm can accurately measure the three dimensional ground coordinates using three antennas. In a set of 70 simulations, the averages of errors in x, y and z directions were approximately -0.40 m, -0.02 m and 4.22 m, respectively and the RMSEs were about 3.40 m, 0.30 m and 6.20 m, respectively. The overall results represent that the proposed algorithm is effective for accurate three dimensional ground positioning.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_3
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• pp.1671-1678
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• 2023

The Korea multi-purpose satellite (KOMPSAT) series consisting of multi-sensors has been used in various fields such as land, environmental monitoring, and disaster analysis since its first launch in 1999. Recently, as various information processing technologies (high-speed computing technology, computer vision, artificial intelligence, etc.) that are rapidly developing are utilized in the field of remote sensing, it has become possible to develop more various satellite image processing and analysis algorithms. In this special issue, we would like to introduce recently researched technologies related to the KOMPSAT image application and research topics participated in the 2023 Satellite Information Application Contest.

• 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.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.627-635
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• 2020

With the increasing severity of climate change, intense torrential rains are occurring more frequently globally. Flooding due to torrential rain not only causes substantial damage directly, but also via secondary events such as landslides. Therefore, accurate and prompt flood detection is required. Because it is difficult to directly access flooded areas, previous studies have largely used satellite images. Traditionally, water indices such asthe normalized difference water index (NDWI) and modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI) which are based on different optical bands acquired by satellites, are used to detect floods. In addition, as flooding likelihood is greatly influenced by the weather, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images have also been used, because these are less influenced by weather conditions. In this study, we compared flood areas calculated from SAR images and water indices derived from Landsat-8 images, where the images were acquired at similar times. The flooded area was calculated from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-1 images taken between the end of May and August 2019 at Lijiazhou Island, China, which is located in the Changjiang (Yangtze) River basin and experiences annual floods. As a result, the flooded area calculated using the MNDWI was approximately 21% larger on average than that calculated using the NDWI. In a comparison of flood areas calculated using water indices and SAR intensity images, the flood areas calculated using SAR images tended to be smaller, regardless of the order in which the images were acquired. Because the images were acquired by the two satellites on different dates, we could not directly compare the accuracy of the water-index and SAR data. Nevertheless, this study demonstrates that floods can be detected using both optical and SAR satellite data.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.801-810
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• 2018

Ship monitoring using satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images consists of ship detection, ship discrimination, and ship classification. A large number of methods have been proposed to improve the detection and discrimination capabilities, while only a few studies exist for ship classification. Thus, many studies for the ship classification are needed to construct ship monitoring system having high performance. Note that constructing database (DB), which contains both SAR images and labels of various ships, is important for research on the ship classification. In the airborne SAR classification, many methods have been developed using moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) DB. However, there has been no publicly available DB for research on the ship classification using satellite SAR images. Recently, Shanghai Key Laboratory has constructed OpenSARShip DB using both SAR images of various ships generated from Sentinel-1 satellite of European Space Agency (ESA) and automatic identification system (AIS) information. Thus, the applicability of OpenSARShip DB for ship classification should be investigated by using the concepts of airborne SAR classification which have shown high performances. In this study, ship classification using satellite SAR images are conducted by applying the concepts of airborne SAR classification to OpenSARShip DB, and then the applicability of OpenSARShip DB is investigated by analyzing the classification performances.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.33 no.6_1
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• pp.947-960
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• 2017

Soil moisture plays an important role to affect the Earth's radiative energy balance and water cycle. In general, satellite observations are useful for estimating the soil moisture content. Passive microwave satellites have an advantage of direct sensitivity on surface soil moisture. However, their coarse spatial resolutions (10-36 km) are not suitable for regional-scale hydrological applications. Meanwhile, in-situ ground observations of point-based soil moisture content have the disadvantage of spatially discontinuous information. This paper presents an experimental soil moisture retrieval using Sentinel-1 SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) with 10m spatial resolution for cropland in South Korea. We developed a soil moisture retrieval algorithm based on the technique of linear regression and SVR (support vector regression) using the ground observations at five in-situ sites and Sentinel-1 SAR data from April to October in 2015-2017 period. Our results showed the polarization dependency on the different soil sensitivities at backscattered signals, but no polarization dependence on the accuracies. No particular seasonal characteristics of the soil moisture retrieval imply that soil moisture is generally more affected by hydro-meteorology and land surface characteristics than by phenological factors. At the narrower range of incidence angles, the relationship between the backscattered signal and soil moisture content was more distinct because the decreasing surface interference increased the retrieval accuracies under the condition of evenly distributed soil moisture (during the raining period or on the paddy field). We had an overall error estimate of RMSE (root mean square error) of approximately 6.5%. Our soil moisture retrieval algorithm will be improved if the effects of surface roughness, geomorphology, and soil properties would be considered in the future works.