A Preliminary Study on SAR Advanced Information Retrieval and Scene Reconstruction

Rapid advances in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technologies have brought challenges in image interpretation toward the development of new Earth observation applications. Both novel scattering-imaging models and intelligent inversion techniques are required for advanced information retrieval and interpretation of high-resolution multidimension and multimode SAR data. As an example, scene reconstruction attempts to transfer the SAR image to human-understandable representation of man-made targets and natural environment. In this letter, a framework for scene reconstruction is outlined. It includes three key elements: a dictionary of parametric scatterer model, a method for scatterer recognition and parameter estimation, and a method for target reconstruction. A preliminary case is presented, where a simulated 3-D SAR image of a simple target is successfully reconstructed to a solid geometry. It uses a novel surface extension method to connect isolated scatterers to form a complete target geometry.