Location
University of Utah
Start Date
6-12-1996 9:15 AM
Description
Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery of high relief areas suffers from terrain induced distortion known as foreshortening. This distortion prevents accurate registration to images from other sources, such as Landsat TM images. If a Digital Elevation Model is used to provide accurate elevation estimates during the SAR image formation processing, foreshortening can be eliminated. However, because of processing complexity, this operation this is not typically done. This paper shows how the end user of SAR imagery can use a Digital Elevation Model and platform ephemeris to estimate the foreshortening error and correct the imagery. Results of an actual SIR-C SAR and Landsat TM image coregistration shows an improvement in cross track registration error from 9.17 pixels to 1.17 pixels when this method is applied
Correcting SAR Foreshortening Error With a Digital Elevation Model
University of Utah
Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery of high relief areas suffers from terrain induced distortion known as foreshortening. This distortion prevents accurate registration to images from other sources, such as Landsat TM images. If a Digital Elevation Model is used to provide accurate elevation estimates during the SAR image formation processing, foreshortening can be eliminated. However, because of processing complexity, this operation this is not typically done. This paper shows how the end user of SAR imagery can use a Digital Elevation Model and platform ephemeris to estimate the foreshortening error and correct the imagery. Results of an actual SIR-C SAR and Landsat TM image coregistration shows an improvement in cross track registration error from 9.17 pixels to 1.17 pixels when this method is applied