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Editorial Board Members' Collection Series: 'New Advances on SAR/Pol/InSAR/TomoSAR Techniques and Applications'

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A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "Engineering Remote Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2024) | Viewed by 4738

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Gabriel Vasile

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Grenoble-Image-sPeech-Signal-Automatics Lab (GIPSA-Lab), National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), CEDEX, F-38402 Grenoble, France
Interests: speckle; polarimetry; interferometry; applied electromagnetics; acoustics and vibration; tomography; remote sensing; big data analytics.
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Stefano Tebaldini

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Politecnico di Milano, Department of Information, Electronics, and Bioengineering, Milan, Italy
Interests: radar remote sensing; diffraction tomography; inverse problems; EM imaging; SAR processing; signal and image processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In recent decades, SAR and SAR Interferometry (InSAR) have been widely applied in the field of remote sensing.

A new generation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instruments, mounted onboard space and aerial vectors, has been emerging over recent years. It provides high-resolution, day-and-night and weather-independent images for a multitude of applications ranging from Earth observation to planetary exploration.

From its initial development as a new and pioneering remote sensing tool for measuring Earth topography and surface deformation, InSAR has been now developed into a mature technique, routinely used to provide crucial constraints on a broad and diverse range of Earth science processes. This process required remarkable technological efforts to build SAR systems capable of producing high-quality data and accurately repeating their orbits, as well as introducing new signal processing methods to jointly process the information gathered by multiple SAR images (multitemporal or polarimetric). In this context, the development was not limited to SAR interferometry, but spread to the investigation of SAR Tomography (TomoSAR) techniques, where multiple SAR images are jointly processed to produce a three-dimensional representation of the imaged scene.

The near future of SAR remote sensing appears today as bright as ever. On the one side, there is a constant push to build more sophisticated and better performing SAR satellites, resulting in new concepts such as high-resolution wide swath (HRWS), digital beamforming, and MIMO SARs. On the other side, private companies have been pushing the concept of new SAR systems based on small satellite technology, announcing plans for constellations of several dozen elements. In this context, this Topic Collection aims to share new theoretical and experimental work on SAR concepts, instrumentations, techniques, and applications. We aim to attract the submission of both review and original research articles related to, but not limited to:

Exploitation of the existing and planned SAR missions
SAR data/image processing;
SAR signal modeling;
SAR/InSAR applications;
advances in polarimetric InSAR and tomography SAR techniques;
multi-temporal/multi-mode InSAR methods;
fusion of SAR and optical data;
future perspectives in the use of SAR data.

Manuscripts for this important Topical Collection of Remote Sensing will be accepted by the editorial office, the editor-in-chief, and editorial board members by invitation only.

Dr. Gabriel Vasile
Dr. Stefano Tebaldini
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

SAR interferometry
SAR tomography
SAR polarimetry
HRWS
MIMO SAR
small satellites

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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19 pages, 9370 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Hierarchical Fusion SAR Image Change-Detection Method Based on HF-CRF Model

by Jianlong Zhang, Yifan Liu, Bin Wang and Chen Chen

Remote Sens. 2023, 15(11), 2741; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs15112741 - 25 May 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1098

Abstract

The mainstream methods for change detection in synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) images use difference images to define the initial change regions. However, methods can suffer from semantic collapse, which makes it difficult to determine semantic information about the changes. In this paper, we proposed a hierarchical fusion SAR image change-detection model based on hierarchical fusion conditional random field (HF-CRF). This model introduces multimodal difference images and constructs the fusion energy potential function using dynamic convolutional neural networks and sliding window entropy information. By using an iterative convergence process, the proposed method was able to accurately detect the change-detection regions. We designed a dynamic region convolutional semantic segmentation network with a two-branch structure (D-DRUNet) to accomplish feature fusion and the segmentation of multimodal difference images. The proposed network adopts a dual encoder–single decoder structure where the baseline is the UNet network that utilizes dynamic convolution kernels. D-DRUNet extracts multimodal difference features and completes semantic-level fusion. The Sobel operator is introduced to strengthen the multimodal difference-image boundary information and construct the dynamic fusion pairwise potential function, based on local boundary entropy. Finally, the final change result is stabilized by iterative convergence of the CRF energy potential function. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in terms of the overall number of detection errors, and reduces the occurrence of false positives. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Editorial Board Members' Collection Series: 'New Advances on SAR/Pol/InSAR/TomoSAR Techniques and Applications')

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20 pages, 4583 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Very High Resolution Automotive SAR Imaging from Burst Data

by Mattia Giovanni Polisano, Marco Manzoni, Stefano Tebaldini, Andrea Monti-Guarnieri, Claudio Maria Prati and Ivan Russo

Remote Sens. 2023, 15(3), 845; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs15030845 - 2 Feb 2023

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1663

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for efficient and accurate removal of grating lobes in automotive Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. Grating lobes can indeed be mistaken as real targets, inducing in this way false alarms in the target detection procedure. Grating lobes are present whenever SAR focusing is performed using data acquired on a non-continuous basis. This kind of acquisition is typical in the automotive scenario, where regulations do not allow for a continuous operation of the radar. Radar pulses are thus transmitted and received in bursts, leading to a spectrum of the signal containing gaps. We start by deriving a suitable reference frame in which SAR images are focused. It will be shown that working in this coordinate system is particularly convenient since it allows for a signal spectrum that is space-invariant and with spectral gaps described by a simple one-dimensional function. After an inter-burst calibration step, we exploit these spectral characteristics of the signal by implementing a compressive sensing algorithm aimed at removing grating lobes. The proposed approach is validated using real data acquired by an eight-channel automotive radar operating in burst mode at 77 GHz. Results demonstrate the practical possibility to process a synthetic aperture length as long as up to 2 m reaching in this way extremely fine angular resolutions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Editorial Board Members' Collection Series: 'New Advances on SAR/Pol/InSAR/TomoSAR Techniques and Applications')

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Review

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18 pages, 4187 KiB

Open AccessReview

Real Representation of the Polarimetric Scattering Matrix for Monostatic Radar

by Madalina Ciuca, Gabriel Vasile, Andrei Anghel, Michel Gay and Silviu Ciochina

Remote Sens. 2023, 15(4), 1037; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs15041037 - 14 Feb 2023

Viewed by 1556

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar with polarimetric diversity is a powerful tool in remote sensing. Each pixel is described by the scattering matrix corresponding to the emission/reception polarization states (usually horizontal and vertical). The algebraic real representation, a block symmetric matrix form, is introduced to adopt a more comprehensive framework (non-restricted by reciprocity assumptions) in mapping the scattering matrix by the consimilarity equivalence relation. The proposed representation can reveal potentially new information. For example, its eigenvalue decomposition, which is itself a necessary step in obtaining the consimilarity transformation products, may be useful in characterizing the degree of reciprocity/nonreciprocity. As a consequence, it can be employed in testing the reciprocity compliance assumed with monostatic PolSAR data. Full-wave simulated polarimetric data confirm that oriented scatterers can present complex eigenvalues, even with the monostatic geometry. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Editorial Board Members' Collection Series: 'New Advances on SAR/Pol/InSAR/TomoSAR Techniques and Applications')

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