Analysis of Urban Land Use Pattern Based on High Resolution Radar Imagery

Abstract

Radar sensors are capable of acquiring data at day and night, independently of weather or environmental conditions. Hence, radar data is more reliably available than optical imagery. This is particularly important in case of damage assessment and disaster management or -in general- when data must be acquired at specific dates. However, high resolution radar imagery has barely been employed for these purposes so far. A fact that is mainly due to a lack of civil space borne radar systems featuring a ground resolution which is suitable for the analysis of urban structures. Additionally significant difficulties concerning the interpretation of according data over highly structured urban areas occur. The TerraSAR-X system will provide radar imagery with a spatial resolution comparable to actual high resolution optical platforms. Thus, it will afford detailed urban analysis based on space borne radar imagery for the first time. Therefore the German Space Center (DLR) and the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DLR-DFD) respectively, investigates the potential use of high resolution radar data with respect to a support of regional and urban planning authorities. A concept was developed for investigating the potential use of TerraSAR-X data in the context of urban applications. It introduces a temporally and spatially robust approach towards an automated analysis of the urban structure using data of the Experimental Synthetic Aperture Radar (E-SAR) system of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). For that purpose data sets of single-polarised X-band imagery are analysed by means of an object-oriented classification. Additionally C- and multi-polarized L-band data were acquired.