EuroSDR Projects - Host Ireland

2 Test Sites and Test Data
The test sites investigated in the contest were selected to be neither too complex nor to contain overly
simplistic structures. For example, very densely built-up urban regions are hardly to be found. They
certainly would have posed a particularly difficult challenge for SAR imaging, which is why it seemed
to be appropriate not to investigate them intensively. Therefore, selected test areas include agricultural
and forested rural regions as well as industrial and urban areas. Four different test sites with different
contents were selected for the contest. The test areas were located in
• Germany – Trudering: Area around the new fair in Munich - industrial and rural regions
• Germany – Oberpfaffenhofen: Campus and runway of DLR - agricultural and airport regions
• Denmark – Copenhagen: City of Copenhagen - residential and industrial areas
• Sweden – Fjärdhundra - rural area, forested and agricultural regions
2.1 Specification of the Test Data
The data used in the contest consisted of optical color as well as black and white photography of
photogrammetric quality and state-of-the-art airborne SAR with multiple polarizations and different
wavelengths. To meet the objectives only single-pass SAR data is used. In order to account for the
large variety of modern SAR systems, different frequencies as well as polarimetric data were selected.
Certainly, there are even more parameters strongly influencing the appearance of topographic objects
in SAR imagery – such as incidence angle and direction. In spite of their importance regarding object
appearance, these parameters could not be considered, as the high demands of the contest regarding
resolution, and other more practical matters, such as data costs and copyright, already impose restrictive
conditions. The specifications of the SAR images are shown in Table 3.
Test Site Sensor Polarisation
Trudering,
Germany
Oberpfaffenhofen,
Germany
Copenhagen,
Denmark
Fjärdhundra,
Sweden
Test Data
Resolution
Looks
AeS-1 None X-Band 1.5 m 16
E-SAR Lexicographic L-Band 3.0 m 4
EMISAR Pauli C-Band 4.0 m 8
EMISAR Pauli C-Band 4.0 m 8
Table 3: SAR images used for different test areas
The resolution of the test data ranges from 1.5 m to 4.0 m and depends on the resolution of the SAR
sensors. The corresponding optical images were of higher resolution so that they had to be resampled
to the pixel size of the SAR images to enable a fair comparison. Thus, the resolutions of the corresponding
optical images are the same as those of the SAR images. The following figures (Figure 1 -
Figure 4) show the four chosen test data sets. On the left side of the figure the optical image is shown;
on the right side the corresponding SAR image. The sections shown are co-registered with pixel
accuracy.
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