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...

High resolution remote sensing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from TerraSAR-X/Tandem-X satellites are used to determine and monitor the sea surface in near real time and all weather and illumination conditions. The radar backscatter of the sea surface is determined by the sea surface roughness caused by the wind field and the sea state. These meteo parameters are modelled by the newly deve...

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...

Benefiting from the improved resolution and polarization information of SAR data, ship recognition has attracted much attention during the last decade. This paper considers the ship recognition in TerraSAR-X imagery. We propose a novel feature extraction algorithm, named Superstructure Scattering Distribution (SSD), by investigating the ship’s superstructure and corresponding electromagnetic sc...

Monitoring urban growth and change is an important issue for urban planning and disaster management. In this study, two different approaches are conducted to monitor the urban areas. One is that a TerraSAR-X image is compared with an ALOS/PALSAR image to investigate the characteristics of urban land cover in different radar wavelengths. Also, a very high resolution optical QuickBird image is us...

In this paper an object based classification method for detection of storm damages with TerraSAR-X images is described. The segmentation process is carried out with the software Ecognition. Classification is done by setting a threshold, which is identified by visual interpretation. Afterwards a region growing method is applied and forest GIS and pre storm ortho photos are used to improve the ac...

This paper shows the suitability of High Resolution (HR) TerraSAR-X data for monitoring urban areas by means of feature extraction algorithms able to exploit the new information content provided by HR Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The approach we follow is deterministic and model-based, meaning that the building feature extraction is based on the direct inversion of the electromagnetic...