Spaceborne Traffic Monitoring with Dual Channel Synthetic Aperture Radar Theory and Experiments

This paper revises the theoretical background for upcoming dual-channel Radar satellite missions to monitor traffic from space. As it is well-known, an object moving with a velocity deviating from the assumptions incorporated in the focusing process will generally appear both displaced and blurred in the azimuth direction. To study the impact of these (and related) distortions in focused SAR images, the analytic relations between an arbitrarily moving point scatterer and its conjugate in the SAR image have been reviewed and adapted to dual-channel satellite specifications. To be able to monitor traffic under these boundary conditions in real-life situations, a specific detection scheme is proposed. This scheme integrates complementary detection and velocity estimation algorithms with knowledge derived from external sources as, e.g., road databases.