Detection and recognition of vehicles in high-resolution SAR imagery

Designing SAR sensors is an extremely complex process. Thereby it is very important to keep in mind the goal for which the SAR sensor has to be built. For military purpose the detection and recognition of vehicles is essential. To give recommendations for design and use of SAR sensors we carried out interpreter experiments. To assess the interpreter performance we measured performance parameters like detection rate, false alarm rate etc. The following topics were of interest: How do the SAR sensor parameters bandwidth and incidence angle influence the interpreter performance? Could the length, width and orientation of vehicles be measured in SAR-images? Which information (size, signature...) will be used by the interpreters for vehicle recognition? Using our SaLVe evaluation testbed we prepared lots of images from the experimental SAR-system DOSAR (EADS Dornier) and defined several military interpretation tasks for the trials. In a 4 weeks experiment 30 German military photo interpreters had to detect and classify tanks and trucks in X-Band images with different resolutions. To accustom the interpreters to SAR image interpretation they carried out a computer based SAR tutorial. To complete the investigations also subjective assessment of image quality was done by the interpreters.