Development of a GMTI Processing System for the Extraction of Traffic Information from TerraSAR-X Data

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has a day-and-night and all-weather operating capability, can acquire high-resolution images of large areas within short time frames and can measure the speed of moving objects. That is why its application to ground moving target indication (GMTI) and to traffic monitoring has been intensively investigated in the recent years. The German SAR satellite TerraSAR-X, which is scheduled to be launched later in 2006, will provide various SAR imaging modes with resolutions down to 1m. It will additionally allow for different operating modes for along-track interferometry (ATI) which is sensitive to across-track motions of moving objects. This paper introduces a first approach for the concept of a traffic information extraction processor for TerraSAR-X data.