Fusion of synthetic aperture radar data and visible imagery from SIR-C

摘要

Remotely sensed imagery from space has typically been done by platforms using only one portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The SIR-C/X-SAR Space Shuttle mission, however, had the unique opportunity to obtain visible imagery and synthetic aperture radar data from the same platform. SAR and visible images of Norfolk Navy Base in Norfolk, Virginia were successfully merged and analyzed, demonstrating that combining the information from two different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum increases the useful information content of an image. Principal Component Analysis on the radar data demonstrated successful data reduction and feature extraction. Attempts at unsupervised classification using neural network analysis were less successful.