Efficient Radar Imaging Simulation for Urban Structures

Radar imaging simulators can be used to support the analysis of radar scattering effects, assist in scene interpretation, and for training and teaching. Moreover, they can be used for information extraction, by generating simulated images based on hypotheses and comparing them with measured images. To that end, the simulator needs to be fast and efficient. With the recent advent of very high resolution (VHR) spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors such as TerraSAR-X, Cosmo- SkyMED and Radarsat-2, the potential to use SAR simulators is increasing. In this paper, we propose a novel radar imaging simulator that is relatively simple to implement and that finds a balance between accuracy and efficiency. The simulator is based on an adapted ray tracing procedure to determine which surfaces of a generic object are visible. The backscatter contributions are calculated by means of a Lambertian - specular mixture model emphasizing the geometrical effects of the scattering. The simulator has already been employed successfully in a methodology for 3D reconstruction of manmade objects from single detected VHR SAR imagery. Here, we illustrate its efficiency on two rather different structures, a rectangular gable-roof building and an Egyptian pyramid.

BRUNNER Dominik;  LEMOINE Guido;  GREIDANUS Harm;  BRUZZONE Lorenzo; 

2010-12-02

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC

JRC53178

1545-598X,   

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5510086,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC53178,   

10.1109/LGRS.2010.2051214,