Radar data visualization
Background
The nature of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images poses some problems for interactive visualization:
- SAR images are typically very large (16000x4000 pixels or more). This makes efficient memory management necessary.
- A pixel of a SAR image consists of two floating point numbers which form a complex reflectivity value. The amplitude of this value is usually mapped to gray levels for display. Since the dynamic range of amplitude values is much larger than the dynamic range of gray levels for common display devices, this mapping implies dynamic range reduction.
- Due to the coherent illumination used in SAR systems, SAR images are inherently affected by a high amount of multiplicative speckle noise. This hinders the interpretation and analysis of the images. A visualization system must therefore offer adjustable despeckling methods.
- All of the necessary data processing should be fast enough to allow both interactive navigation in the data and interactive adjustment of dynamic range reduction and despeckling parameters.
The goal of this research project is to use todays programmable PC graphics hardware to meet these requirements.
The following video gives a first impression of our visualization framework: sarvis.avi
This research project is partially funded by grant KO-2960-3/1 from the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Bistatic SAR image of Oberndorf/Lech
Raw data acquired in November 2003 and provided by FHR/FGAN
Processed at ZESS/IPP
Papers
| · | M. Lambers, A. Kolb, H. Nies, M. Kalkuhl |
| GPU-based Framework for Interactive Visualization of SAR Data | |
| In Proc. Int. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2007, pages 4076 - 4079 | |
| [bib] [pdf] |
| · | M. Kalkuhl, P. Droste, W. Wiechert, H. Nies, O. Loffeld, M. Lambers |
| Parallel Computation of Synthetic SAR Raw Data | |
| In Proc. Int. Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2007 | |
| [bib] |
| · | M. Lambers, A. Kolb |
| Adaptive Dynamic Range Reduction for SAR Images | |
| In Proc. 7th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar (EUSAR), 3, 2008, pages 371-374 | |
| [bib] [pdf] |
| · | M. Lambers, H. Nies, A. Kolb |
| Interactive Dynamic Range Reduction for SAR Images | |
| In Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 5(3), 2008, pages 507-511 | |
| [bib] [pdf] |
| · | M. Lambers, A. Kolb |
| Automatic Point Target Detection For Interactive Visual Analysis of SAR Images | |
| In Proc. Int. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2008 | |
| [bib] [pdf] |