SAR simulation for urban scene analysis

In this paper the Coherent Ray Tracing SAR Simulator (CohRaSS) developed at Fraunhofer IOSB is described. While there exists a version of CohRaSS that is custom-tailored to the creation of many images of small scenes e.g. for automatic classification purposes, the focus of this paper is set on the creation of simulated SAR images of large scenes for urban scene analysis. The computational challenges encountered in the processing of large amounts of data are discussed as well as some ways to overcome them that have been included in the version of CohRaSS designed for the simulation of large scenes at very high resolutions. Examples of simulated urban scenes are shown that are representative for the applications this simulator was developed for.