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Earth Environment Monitoring with Advanced Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar: New Architectures, Operational Modes, and Processing Techniques

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A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2021) | Viewed by 10889

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Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Yunkai Deng

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Guest Editor

Chinese Academy of Sciences Aerospace Information Research Institute,China
Interests: Microwave Remote Sensing Theory; Radar System and Signal Processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Xinming Tang

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Land Satellite Remote Sensing Application Center （LASAC) Ministry of Natural Resources, China
Interests: land satellite application; satellite surveying and mapping; remote sensing image processing

Dr. Feng Xu

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School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan, China
Interests: fast electromagnetic modeling for complicated target and environments; target reconstruction from Multidimensional High-Resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images; inverse scattering tomography; SAR remote sensing applications in Earth Observation

Prof. Dr. Guoxiang Liu

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Faculty of Geosciences and Environmental Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China
Interests: time-series InSAR; high-resolaution optical remote sensing; digital elevation modelling; monitoring and inversing of ground deformation; monitoring and analyzing of geological hazards
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Daqing Ge

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China Aero Geophysical Survey and Remote Sensing Center For Natural Resources, China
Interests: InSAR algorithm and data processing; geohazards monitoring and risk mitigation; remote sensing

Prof. Dr. Robert Wang

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Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR), University of Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China
Interests: bistatic spaceborne SAR imaging technology; high-resolution spaceborne SAR systems and data processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The project ‘Earth Environment Monitoring with Advanced Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar: New Architectures, Operational Modes, and Processing Techniques (2017YFB0502700)’ belongs to the National Key Research and Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. The original intention of this project is to (a) build a comprehensive environmental monitoring indicator system for the land surveying, disaster prevention, earthquake, ocean, forest, and other industries, (b) establish reliable microwave scattering models, (c) develop new SAR architectures, operational modes, and processing methods, (d) propose quantitative inversion technologies. The final result of the project is a comprehensive environmental monitoring technical solution based on microwave remote sensing.

This Special Issue will collect manuscripts focused on new methodologies or applications of well-known remote sensing techniques in the field of new SAR architectures, operational modes, and processing methods. Examples of areas covered within this research topic include, but are not restricted to, the following:

Innovative SAR architectures and operational modes
Microwave scattering mechanism and model
InSAR topography and geodesy
Multi-mode SAR imaging
Quantitative SAR applications

Prof. Yunkai Deng
Dr. Xinming Tang
Dr. Feng Xu
Prof. Guoxiang Liu
Dr. Daqing Ge
Prof. Dr. Robert Wang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

SAR data processing
InSAR
Polarimetric SAR
Multi-base SAR
mechanism model
vegetation parameters inversion
Ocean current velocity

Published Papers (4 papers)

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26 pages, 29921 KiB

Open AccessArticle

IGS-CMAES: A Two-Stage Optimization for Ground Deformation and DEM Error Estimation in Time Series InSAR Data

by Xinyao Sun, Aaron Zimmer, Subhayan Mukherjee, Parwant Ghuman and Irene Cheng

Remote Sens. 2021, 13(13), 2615; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs13132615 - 03 Jul 2021

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2623

Abstract

Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has become an increasingly recognized remote sensing technology for earth surface monitoring. Slow and subtle terrain displacements can be estimated using time-series InSAR (TSInSAR) data. However, a substantial increase in the availability of exclusive time series data necessitates the development of more efficient and effective algorithms. Research in these areas is usually carried out by solving complicated optimization problems, which is very computationally expensive and time-consuming. This work proposes a two-stage black-box optimization framework to jointly estimate the average ground deformation rate and terrain digital elevation model (DEM) error. The method performs an iterative grid search (IGS) to acquire coarse candidate solutions, and then a covariance matrix adaptive evolution strategy (CMAES) is adopted to obtain the final local results. The performance of our method is evaluated using both simulated and real datasets. Both quantitative and qualitative comparisons using different optimizers support the reliability and effectiveness of our work. The proposed IGS-CMAES achieves higher accuracy with a significantly fewer number of objective function evaluations than other established algorithms. It offers the possibility for wide-area monitoring, where high precision and real-time processing is essential. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Earth Environment Monitoring with Advanced Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar: New Architectures, Operational Modes, and Processing Techniques)

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22 pages, 4765 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Ambiguity Suppression Based on Joint Optimization for Multichannel Hybrid and ±π/4 Quad-Pol SAR Systems

by Pengfei Zhao, Yunkai Deng, Wei Wang, Yongwei Zhang and Robert Wang

Remote Sens. 2021, 13(10), 1907; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs13101907 - 13 May 2021

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1752

Abstract

Hybrid and

\pm π / 4

quadrature-polarimetric (quad-pol) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems operating from space can obtain all polarimetric components simultaneously but suffer from severe azimuth ambiguities in the cross-polarized (cross-pol) measurement channels. In this paper, the hybrid and [...] Read more.

Hybrid and

\pm π / 4

\pm π / 4

quad-pol SAR systems with multiple receive channels in azimuth are widely investigated to suppress the azimuth ambiguities of the cross-pol components. We first provide a more thorough analysis of the multichannel hybrid and

\pm π / 4

quad-pol SAR systems. Then, the multichannel signal processing is briefly discussed for the reconstruction of the quad-pol SAR signal from the aliased signals, in which the conventional reconstruction algorithm causes extremely severe azimuth ambiguities. To this end, an improved reconstruction method is proposed based on a joint optimization, which allows for the minimization of ambiguities from the desired polarization and the simultaneous power of undesired polarized signal. This method can largely suppress azimuth ambiguities compared with the conventional reconstruction algorithm. Finally, to verify the advantages and effectiveness of the proposed approach, the azimuth ambiguity-to-signal ratio (AASR), the range ambiguity-to-signal ratio (RASR) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of all polarizations, as well as a set of imaging simulation results, are given to describe the effects of reconstruction on the multichannel hybrid and

\pm π / 4

quad-pol SAR systems. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Earth Environment Monitoring with Advanced Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar: New Architectures, Operational Modes, and Processing Techniques)

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21 pages, 11564 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Monitoring Dynamic Evolution of the Glacial Lakes by Using Time Series of Sentinel-1A SAR Images

by Bo Zhang, Guoxiang Liu, Rui Zhang, Yin Fu, Qiao Liu, Jialun Cai, Xiaowen Wang and Zhilin Li

Remote Sens. 2021, 13(7), 1313; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs13071313 - 30 Mar 2021

Cited by 16 | Viewed by 3461

Abstract

As an approach with great potential, the interpretation of space-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images has been applied for monitoring the dynamic evolution of the glacial lakes in recent years. Considering unfavorable factors, such as inherent topography-induced effects and speckle noise in SAR images, it is challenging to accurately map and track the dynamic evolution of the glacial lakes by using multi-temporal SAR images. This paper presents an improved neighborhood-based ratio method utilizing a time series of SAR images to identify the boundaries of the glacial lakes and detect their spatiotemporal changes. The proposed method was applied to monitor the dynamic evolution of the two glacial lakes with periodic water discharge at the terminus of the Gongba Glacier in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau by utilizing 144 Sentinel-1A SAR images collected between October of 2014 and November of 2020. We first generated the reference intensity image (RII) by averaging all the SAR images collected when the water in the glacial lakes was wholly discharged, then calculated the neighborhood-based ratio between RII and each SAR intensity image, and finally identified the boundaries of the glacial lakes by a ratio threshold determined statistically. The time series of areas of the glacial lakes were estimated in this way, and the dates for water recharging and discharging were accordingly determined. The testing results showed that the water of the two glacial lakes began to be recharged in April and reached their peak in August and then remained stable dynamically until they began to shrink in October and were discharged entirely in February of the following year. We observed the expansion process with annual growth rates of 3.19% and 12.63% for these two glacial lakes, respectively, and monitored a glacial lake outburst flood event in July 2018. The validation by comparing with the results derived from Sentinel-2A/B optical images indicates that the accuracy for identifying the boundaries of the glacial lakes with Sentinel-1A SAR images can reach up to 96.49%. Generally, this contribution demonstrates the reliability and precision of SAR images to provide regular updates for the dynamic monitoring of glacial lakes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Earth Environment Monitoring with Advanced Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar: New Architectures, Operational Modes, and Processing Techniques)

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14 pages, 7065 KiB

Open AccessTechnical Note

A Waveform-Encoded SAR Implementation Using a Limited Number of Cyclically Shifted Chirps

by Se-Yeon Jeon, Fabian Glatz and Michelangelo Villano

Remote Sens. 2021, 13(15), 3038; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rs13153038 - 02 Aug 2021

Viewed by 1968

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provides high-resolution images of the Earth’s surface irrespective of sunlight and weather conditions. In conventional spaceborne SAR, nadir echoes caused by the pulsed operation of SAR may significantly affect the SAR image quality. Therefore, the pulse repetition frequency (PRF) is constrained within the SAR system design to avoid the appearance of nadir echoes in the SAR image. As an alternative, the waveform-encoded SAR concept using a pulse-to-pulse variation of the transmitted waveform and dual-focus postprocessing can be exploited for nadir echo removal and to alleviate the PRF constraints. In particular, cyclically shifted chirps have been proposed as a possible waveform variation scheme. However, a large number of distinct waveforms is required to enable the simple implementation of the concept. This work proposes a technique based on the Eulerian circuit for generating a waveform sequence starting from a reduced number of distinct cyclically shifted chirps that can be effectively exploited for waveform-encoded SAR. The nadir echo suppression performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed through simulations using real TerraSAR-X data and a realistic nadir echo model that shows how the number of distinct waveforms and therefore the system complexity can be reduced without significant performance loss. These developments reduce the calibration burden and make the concept viable for implementation in future SAR systems. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Earth Environment Monitoring with Advanced Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar: New Architectures, Operational Modes, and Processing Techniques)

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