SAR Images Refocusing and Scattering Center Detection for Infrastructure Monitoring

Andrei Anghel (1) , Gabriel Vasile (1) , Cornel Ioana (1) , Remus Cacoveanu (2) , Silviu Ciochina (2) , Jean-Philippe Ovarlez (3, 4) , Rémy Boudon (5) , Guy d'Urso (5)

1 GIPSA-SIGMAPHY - GIPSA - Signal Images Physique
2 UPB - University Politehnica of Bucharest [Romania]
3 SONDRA - Sondra, CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay (COmUE)
4 ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab [Palaiseau]
5 EDF - EDF

Infrastructure monitoring applications can require the tracking of slowly moving points of a certain structure. Given a certain point from a structure to be monitored, in the context of available SAR products where the image is already focused in a slant range - azimuth grid, it is not obvious if this point is the scattering center, if it is in layover or if it is visible from the respective orbit. This paper proposes a refocusing procedure of SAR images on a set of measured points among with a 4D tomography based scattering center detection. The refocusing procedure consists of an azimuth de-focusing followed by a modified back-projection on the given set of points. The presence of a scattering center at the given positions is detected by computing the local elevation-velocity plane for each point and testing if the main response is at zero elevation. The refocusing and scattering center detection algorithm is validated on real data acquired with the TerraSAR-X satellite during March-June 2012. The mean displacement velocities of the detected scatterers show good agreement with the in-situ measurements.

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Andrei Anghel, Gabriel Vasile, Cornel Ioana, Remus Cacoveanu, Silviu Ciochina, et al.. SAR Images Refocusing and Scattering Center Detection for Infrastructure Monitoring. RadarConf14 - 2014 IEEE Radar Conference, May 2014, Cincinnati, United States. pp.334-339, ⟨10.1109/RADAR.2014.6875610⟩. ⟨hal-01065821⟩