This book is concerned with remote sensing based on the technology of imaging radar. It assumes no prior knowledge of radar on the part of the reader, commencing with a treatment of the essential concepts of microwave imaging and progressing through to the development of multipolarisation and interferometric radar, modes which underpin contemporary applications of the technology. The use of radar for imaging the earth’s surface and its resources is not recent. Aircraft-based microwave systems were operating in the 1960s, ahead of optical systems that image in the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum. Optical remote sensing was given a strong impetus with the launch of the first of the Landsat series of satellites in the mid 1970s. Although the Seasat satellite launched in the same era (1978) carried an imaging radar, it operated only for about 12 months and there were not nearly so many microwave systems as optical platforms in service during the 1980s. As a result, the remote sensing community globally tended to develop strongly around optical imaging until Shuttle missions in the early to mid 1980s and free-flying imaging radar satellites in the early to mid 1990s became available, along with several sophisticated aircraft platforms. Since then, and particularly with the unique capabilities and flexibility of imaging radar, there has been an enormous surge of interest in microwave imaging technology. Unlike optical imaging, understanding the theoretical underpinnings of imaging radar can be challenging, particularly when new to the field.

The recent launches of three fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) satellites have shown that polarimetric radar imaging can provide abundant data on the Earth’s environment, such as biomass and forest height estimation, snow cover mapping, glacier monitoring, and damage assessment. Written by two of the most recognized leaders in this field, Polarimetric Radar Imaging: From Basics to Applications presents polarimetric radar imaging and processing techniques and shows how to develop remote sensing applications using PolSAR imaging radar. The book provides a substantial and balanced introduction to the basic theory and advanced concepts of polarimetric scattering mechanisms, speckle statistics and speckle filtering, polarimetric information analysis and extraction techniques, and applications typical to radar polarimetric remote sensing. It explains the importance of wave polarization theory and the speckle phenomenon in the information retrieval problem of microwave imaging and inverse scattering. The authors demonstrate how to devise intelligent information extraction algorithms for remote sensing applications. They also describe more advanced polarimetric analysis techniques for polarimetric target decompositions, polarization orientation effects, polarimetric scattering modeling, speckle filtering, terrain and forest classification, manmade target analysis, and PolSAR interferometry. With sample PolSAR data sets and software available for download, this self-contained, hands-on book encourages you to analyze space-borne and airborne PolSAR and polarimetric interferometric SAR (Pol-InSAR) data and then develop applications using this data.

Introduction to Microwave Remote Sensing offers an extensive overview of this versatile and extremely precise technology for technically oriented undergraduates and graduate students. This textbook emphasizes an important shift in conceptualization and directs it toward students with prior knowledge of optical remote sensing: the author dispels any linkage between microwave and optical remote sensing. Instead, he constructs the concept of microwave remote sensing by comparing it to the process of audio perception, explaining the workings of the ear as a metaphor for microwave instrumentation. This volume takes an “application-driven” approach. Instead of describing the technology and then its uses, this textbook justifies the need for measurement then explains how microwave technology addresses this need. Following a brief summary of the field and a history of the use of microwaves, the book explores the physical properties of microwaves and the polarimetric properties of electromagnetic waves. It examines the interaction of microwaves with matter, analyzes passive atmospheric and passive surface measurements, and describes the operation of altimeters and scatterometers. The textbook concludes by explaining how high resolution images are created using radars, and how techniques of interferometry can be applied to both passive and active sensors.

Modern airborne and spaceborne imaging radars, known as synthetic aperture radars (SARs), are capable of producing high-quality pictures of the earth's surface while avoiding some of the shortcomings of certain other forms of remote imaging systems. Primarily, radar overcomes the nighttime limitations of optical cameras, and the cloud- cover limitations of both optical and infrared imagers. In addition, because imaging radars use a form of coherent illumination, they can be used in certain special modes such as interferometry, to produce some unique derivative image products that incoherent systems cannot. One such product is a highly accurate digital terrain elevation map (DTEM). The most recent (ca. 1980) version of imaging radar, known as spotlight-mode SAR, can produce imagery with spatial resolution that begins to approach that of remote optical imagers. For all of these reasons, synthetic aperture radar imaging is rapidly becoming a key technology in the world of modern remote sensing. Much of the basic `workings' of synthetic aperture radars is rooted in the concepts of signal processing. Starting with that premise, this book explores in depth the fundamental principles upon which the spotlight mode of SAR imaging is constructed, using almost exclusively the language, concepts, and major building blocks of signal processing. Spotlight-Mode Synthetic Aperture Radar: A Signal Processing Approach is intended for a variety of audiences. Engineers and scientists working in the field of remote sensing but who do not have experience with SAR imaging will find an easy entrance into what can seem at times a very complicated subject. Experienced radar engineers will find that the book describes several modern areas of SAR processing that they might not have explored previously, e.g. interferometric SAR for change detection and terrain elevation mapping, or modern non-parametric approaches to SAR autofocus. Senior undergraduates (primarily in electrical engineering) who have had courses in digital signal and image processing, but who have had no exposure to SAR could find the book useful in a one-semester course as a reference.

Principles of Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging: A System Simulation Approach demonstrates the use of image simulation for SAR. It covers the various applications of SAR (including feature extraction, target classification, and change detection), provides a complete understanding of SAR principles, and illustrates the complete chain of a SAR operati

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a well-known remote sensing technique, but conventional single-antenna SAR is inherently limited by the minimum antenna area constraint. Although there are still technical issues to overcome, multi-antenna SAR offers many benefits, from improved system gain to increased degrees-of-freedom and system flexibility. Multi-Antenna Synthetic Aperture Radar explores the potential and challenges of using multi-antenna SAR in microwave remote sensing applications. These applications include high-resolution imaging, wide-swath remote sensing, ground moving target indication, and 3-D imaging. The book pays particular attention to the signal processing aspects of various multi-antenna SAR from a top-level system perspective. Explore Recent Extensions of Synthetic Aperture Radar Systems The backbone of the book is a series of innovative microwave remote sensing approaches developed by the author. Centered around multi-antenna SAR imaging, these approaches address specific challenges and potential problems in future microwave remote sensing. Chapters examine single-input multiple-output (SIMO) multi-antenna SAR, including azimuth and elevation multi-antenna SAR, and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) SAR. The book details the corresponding system scheme, signal models, time/phase/spatial synchronization methods, and high-precision imaging algorithms. It also investigates their potential applications. Introductory Tutorials and Novel Approaches in Multi-Antenna SAR Imaging Rigorous and self-contained, this is a unique reference for researchers and industry professionals working with microwave remote sensing, SAR imaging, and radar signal processing. In addition to novel approaches, the book also presents tutorials that serve as an introduction to multi-antenna SAR imaging for those who are new to the field.

Possibly the greatest change confronting the practitioner and student of remote sensing in the period since the first edition of this text appeared in 1986 has been the enormous improvement in accessibility to image processing technology. Falling hardware and software costs, combined with an increase in functionality through the development of extremely versatile user interfaces, has meant that even the user unskilled in computing now has immediate and ready access to powerful and flexible means for digital image analysis and enhancement. An understanding, at algorithmic level, of the various methods for image processing has become therefore even more important in the past few years to ensure the full capability of digital image processing is utilised. This period has also been a busy one in relation to digital data supply. Several nations have become satellite data gatherers and providers, using both optical and microwave technology. Practitioners and researchers are now faced, therefore, with the need to be able to process imagery from several sensors, together with other forms of spatial data. This has been driven, to an extent, by developments in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) which, in tum, have led to the appearance of newer image processing procedures as adjuncts to more traditional approaches.

This practical reference shows SAR system designers and remote sensing specialists how to produce higher quality SAR images using data-driven algorithms, and apply powerful new techniques to measure and analyze SAR image content.

?The book gives an excellent theoretical and practical background of SAR in general and specifically of spotlight SAR. The rich experience of the authors in spotlight SAR processing is reflected by a very detailed summary of the associated theory as well as a lot of SAR image examples. These images illustrate the techniques described in the book and provide a valuable connection to practice. This book can be highly recommended to all scientists and engineers involved in SAR system design and SAR data evaluation.?---International Journal of Electronics and Communications

This open access book focuses on the practical application of electromagnetic polarimetry principles in Earth remote sensing with an educational purpose. In the last decade, the operations from fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar such as the Japanese ALOS/PalSAR, the Canadian Radarsat-2 and the German TerraSAR-X and their easy data access for scientific use have developed further the research and data applications at L,C and X band. As a consequence, the wider distribution of polarimetric data sets across the remote sensing community boosted activity and development in polarimetric SAR applications, also in view of future missions. Numerous experiments with real data from spaceborne platforms are shown, with the aim of giving an up-to-date and complete treatment of the unique benefits of fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data in five different domains: forest, agriculture, cryosphere, urban and oceans.