Automatic Extraction of Traffic Flows Using TerraSAR-X Along-Track Interferometry

Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) offers great potential for the measurement of ground traffic flows. A SAR with multiple receiving apertures aligned in flight direction repeatedly images the same ground area with a short time lag. This allows for an effective detection of moving ground obje...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing 2010-02, Vol.48 (2), p.807-819
Main Authors: Suchandt, S., Runge, H., Breit, H., Steinbrecher, U., Kotenkov, A., Balss, U.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Along-track interferometry (ATI)
Apertures
Displacement measurement
Extraction
Grounds
Interferometry
Object detection
Phase detection
Phased arrays
Radar detection
Receiving
Satellites
Spaceborne radar
Synthetic aperture radar
synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
Telecommunication traffic
TerraSAR-X
Traffic engineering
Traffic flow
traffic measurement
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Summary:Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) offers great potential for the measurement of ground traffic flows. A SAR with multiple receiving apertures aligned in flight direction repeatedly images the same ground area with a short time lag. This allows for an effective detection of moving ground objects, whose range variation translates into an interferometric phase signal between the receiving channels. The high-resolution German SAR satellite TerraSAR-X offers several ways to create multiple along-track apertures. We exploit this to demonstrate satellite-based traffic-flow measurements using along-track interferometry (ATI) and Displaced Phase Center Array techniques. In this paper, we address the usage of different TerraSAR-X ATI modes for data acquisition and describe an automatic near-real-time processing chain for the extraction of traffic information. The performance of this TerraSAR-X traffic processor is significantly driven by incorporating a priori knowledge of road networks. We present examples of automatic traffic detection as well as empirical evaluations thereof using different kind of reference data.
ISSN:0196-2892
1558-0644
DOI:10.1109/TGRS.2009.2037919