SAR METADATA STANDARDS: SINGLE-LOOK COMPLEX DATA

Many formats and standards currently exist for metadata for Synthetic Aperture Radar data. One of the more promising standards for single-look complex data is being promoted by the United States National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the "Sensor Independent Complex Data" standard, or SICD for short. This standard provides an XML-encoding for the metadata as well as as a specification for the image data. While it does not cover all possible kinds of data, is it designed to be applicable to most current single-look complex datasets. However, it was developed independently of other geospatial standards and organizations, and so does not interoperate with them. The current effort by the IEEE SAR Metadata Standard Working Group is aimed at harmionizing this standard with existing ISO standards so that interoperability is enhanced, and international adoption is encouraged. For now, the standard that is being developed only concerns the metadata, and not the image data. It also does not specify an encoding, rather allowing the marketplace to choose an appropriate encodeing based on current technology. This enables data providers to optimize how they provide their data to their customers without forcing them to use outdated technology. This standard is designed to enable providers of processing software to provide tools that can be applied to a much wider variety of SAR data than is currently possible.