SAR Image Processing and Analysis at DERA Malvern

摘要

The Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), Malvern have been engaged in the testing and development of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and MTI systems for many decades. In that lime they have built expertise both in the processing of SAR data, and in the analysis and interpretation of SAR images. Milestone achievements include the development of patented autofocus algorithms, speckle reduction and segmentation techniques, and the first ever production of 7cm resolution, airborne, X-band SAR images. Current research priorities are in high resolution and low frequency SAR, target detection and recognition, and image interpretation techniques, with specific application to SAR. DERA are engaged in the investigation and development of generic techniques, exploitation of different types of prior knowledge, exploitation of multiple image sets, interferometric pha.sc unwrapping, wide area change detection, segmentation of linear features and optimisation of algorithms for fast execution. SAR image interpretation techniques currently under development can provide information about the constituent components of a scene, such as man-made targets, communication channels (roads and railways), terrain variation and types of terrain cover (forests and rivers). Examples are presented of current research into SAR and MTI processing and image analysis.