Abstract
National Space Development Agency of Japan(NASDA) conducted SAR-580 experiment from October to November, 1983 in Japan by using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with variable parameters such as incidence angle, frequency and polarization mounted on an aircraft Convair 580 owned by Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS).
The purposes of this experiment are to evaluate parameters of SAR mounted on Japanese Earth Resources Satellite-1 (ERS-1) to be launched in 1991, to develop calibration and processing method, to evaluate effectiveness of SAR in various application fields and to study optimum SAR parameters for future spaceborne SAR. In order to accomplish these objectives, about 100 scenes have been digitally processed by autofocusing method which has been developed for this experiment and quantitative comparison of SAR images with different parameters has been made for various targets in several test sites. As a result, effect of SAR parameters (off-nadir angle, frequency, polarization, signal to noise ratio, etc.) on SAR imagery has been clarified.
In this paper, processing and evaluation methods, results of evaluation of SAR parameters will be presented.
