Pattern detection and recognition in SAR images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a powerful tool for remote sensing of the Earth surface. In the paper, several applications of pattern detection and recognition algorithms for extraction of information from SAR images are discussed. In particular, an idea of usage of optical flow techniques for automatic estimation of the moving target displacements from a sequence of single-look SAR images is proposed. It is shown, how this technique can be adopted for SAR imagery. In addition, it is demonstrated that local feature descriptors can be used for automatic SAR panorama creation without information about reference platform orientation. Finally, a problem of automatic target recognition is analyzed. It is shown, that a fusion of azimuth and range profiles of the ground target allows to achieve a competitive accuracy using quite compact feature vectors.