Traffic Monitoring Using Synthetic Aperture Radar

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an established active sensor technique to acquire images of the ground from air-borne and space-borne platforms. With increasing resolution SAR has recently become a promising tool for traffic monitoring since it works independent of daylight and weather and has large spatial coverage. The advanced German SAR satellite TerraSAR-X provides high-resolution images and supports imaging modes suitable for traffic measurement. DLR is developing a traffic information extraction system for TerraSAR-X data to demonstrate highway traffic flow measurement with space-borne SAR. The feasibility to detect and measure moving cars with various SAR sensors has already been shown in this context. The aim of this paper is to introduce the SAR traffic monitoring capability and potential to the transportation research community.