Real-time Sar Simulation for Change Detection Applications Based on Data Fusion

SAR simulators are important tools for developing new SAR systems as well as for supporting the analysis of acquired SAR data. Using modern graphics cards for SAR simulation, even complex environments can be simulated in real-time. This is realized by implementing SAR geometry and radiometry within standard graphics hardware, which nowadays offers 3D hardware acceleration and programmable graphics processing units (GPU). The geometric differences between optical and SAR images are the biggest challenge for any multi-sensor data fusion approach. High-resolution data fusion should be based on 3D models, in urban areas provided by city models. Differences between the model and the newly acquired data can be detected by comparing the simulation of the data with the acquired data. Due to unreliable models and inaccurate simulation results, automatic approaches provide various false alarms. Semi-automatic approaches are more reliable alternatives.