Potential of the “SARptical” system

Abstract

Very high resolution SAR images in dense urban area are not trivial to interpret due to the inevitable layover caused by the side-looking imaging geometry. With the growing attention on very high resolution SAR data, the fusion of optical and SAR images in dense urban area has become an emerging and timely topic, because the complementary of these two data types can lead us to unprecedented insights and findings, such as the unique scattering mechanisms of different urban infrastructures. Lying at the basis of such fusion topic is the challenging task of the co-registration of SAR and optical images. Such two images are acquired with intrinsically different imaging geometries, and thus are nearly impossible to be co-registered without a precise 3-D model of the imaged scene. Only until recently, the “SARptical” system proposed a promising solution to tackle this challenging task. SARptical can trace individual SAR scatterers in corresponding high resolution optical images where we can analyze the geometry, material, and other properties of the imaged object. Vice versa, the similar study can also be done in the SAR image coordinate. This paper demonstrate the capability of the SARptical system, and its potential in various different applications and research directions.