In June, 2010 the German SAR satellite TanDEM-X (TerraSAR-X-Add-on for Digital Elevation Measurements) will be launched. Together with TerraSAR-X, launched June 15, 2007, it will form the first spaceborne bistatic SAR platform. Usually one of the satellite is transmitting (active satellite), while both are receiving. As both satellites fly in a helix orbit constellation, during a recording a sa...

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has a day-and-night and all-weather operating capability, can acquire highresolution images of large areas within short time frames and can measure the speed of moving objects. That is why its application to ground moving target indication (GMTI) and to traffic monitoring has been intensively investigated in the recent years. The German SAR satellite TerraSAR-X, w...

The speckle is omnipresent in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images as an intrinsic characteristic. However, it is unwanted in certain applications. Therefore, intelligent filters for speckle reduction are of great importance. It has been demonstrated in several literatures that the non-local means filter can reduce noise while preserving details. This paper discusses non-local means filter for...

Modern space borne SAR sensors like TerraSAR-X and COSMO-SkyMed are capable of acquiring images with a geometric ground resolution of one meter. Airborne sensors achieve even higher ground resolution. In such very high resolution SAR imagery single objects like houses and bridges become visible. However, effects due to the side-looking slant range acquisition principle of SAR, layover, foreshor...

The objective of this study is to validate an approach based on the change detection in multitemporal TerraSAR images (X-band) for mapping soil moisture in the Sahelian area. In situ measurements were carried out simultaneously with TerraSAR-X acquisitions on two study sites in Niger. The results show the need for comparing the difference between the rainy season image and a reference image acq...

The Altai Mountains are a heritage-rich archaeological landscape with monuments in almost every valley. Modern nation state borders dissect the region and limit archaeological landscape analysis to intra-national areas of interest. Remote sensing can help to overcome these limitations. Due to its high precision, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data can be a very useful tool for supporting archae...

T ERRASAR-X is Germany's first civil radar satellite. It has been realized in a public–private partnership between the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and EADS Astrium GmbH. The high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite, which was successfully launched on June 15, 2007, delivers high-quality radar images for scientific and commercial applications. TerraSAR-X is the fruit of consist...