A Comprehensive Information Model for SAR Data

Each new SAR system deployed in recent years has developed their own version of an existing standard, or created their own from scratch. This makes for a very confusing situation for the data users. The software providers have not been able to keep up, and most users do not have the time or expertise to deal with this issue alone. As more sensors are launched this situation is only getting worse. To help deal with this important issue, aas well many others, the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society has formed a committee to devise new standards and best practices [1]. The committee is using existing standards and revising them where needed in order to promote best practices that can be used for all past SAR sensor systems as well as for systems that have been envisioned for the near future. Currently this is only addressing the metadata that comes with the SAR data. This is the first step in a multi-step process: (1) determine which metadata is needed to fully descibe the image data; (2) devise an encoding and format for the metadata; (3) devise a format for the image data. This paper details the current status and future plans of the committee.