Identification and characterization of railway trains in high resolution TerraSAR-X images

The recognition and analysis of moving targets in SAR images is a well-known topic in remote sensing. The public availability of high resolution SAR satellite images opened new perspectives for space-based small object recognition: traffic monitoring from space has matured into an established technique where the motion characteristics of ships and cars can be extracted routinely. A particular case of traffic monitoring is the search for moving trains in SAR images; here one can locate moving trains, determine their velocity, and identify the type and number of wagons. In the following, we concentrate on features to be extracted from TerraSAR-X images containing commuter trains in the area of Munich, Germany.