Very high resolution Coherent Change Detection

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Coherent Change Detection (CCD) has been found to be of great utility in detecting changes that occur on the ground. Detectable changes of interest include vehicle tracks, water flow, and small scale subsidence. The CCD procedure involves performing repeat pass radar collections to form a coherence product, where ground disturbances can induce detectable incoherence. Currently, SAR imagery of between 10cm and 30cm resolution is considered to be a high resolution, allowing the detection of subtle changes on the ground, however it is of interest to examine CCD images resulting from very high resolution SAR down to 1cm resolution, which in principle could be collected through airborne or spaceborne radar platforms. To perform this study, laboratory data was generated with a ground-based SAR system.