Mapping by Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (sar)

Using advanced SAR data from the Danish airborne SAR, EMISAR, a research project was initiated in 1998 as a collaboration between the Technical University of Denmark and the Danish National Survey and Cadastre to investigate the potential of using SAR data for production and updating of cartographic maps. The ultimate objective of the research is to be able to perform quickly and efficiently compiling and updating of topographic maps using satellite and airborne remote sensing data. The specific objectives for the project are to evaluate the potential of the polarimetric and interferometric SAR to detect the necessary object classes to be used for the thematic map content, and to assess the complementary information gained relative to the results of the traditional methods, and to evaluate the accuracy of methods for retrieval of the necessary map information from SAR data. In the project methods have been developed and studied for extraction of relevant information from the polarimetric and interferometric SAR data about objects like roads, buildings, lakes, fields, forests, etc. A number of feature extraction and land-use classification methods have been implemented and analyzed. Also, the very important issue to use the SAR for change detection as a means of fast, frequent and cost-efficient updating of existing map information has been studied.