The SARTOM Project; Tomography for enhanced target detection for foliage penetrating airborne SAR (First-Year Results)

Abstract

The SARTOM project addresses a key area of defence interest, namely the detection and identification of targets hidden in foliage. The project includes a program of experimental data gathering, combined with the use of advanced processing techniques designed to extract the maximum amount of information contained in the data: namely SAR Tomography and the analysis of multi-polarimetric and multi-frequency systems, including the area of Polarimetric Interferometric SAR (PolinSAR). The remote sensing system used in the project is the DLR airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system known as E-SAR, which covers X-, C-, L- and P-band. In this paper we present the results obtained to-date from the flight trials that were conducted in September 2007 at the test site Dornstetten, west of Munich, Germany. The analysis does not yet include the use of tomography but instead investigates the visibility of targets hidden under a range of different foliage covers compared to targets placed in the open.