Simply looking at the amount of operational (ERS-2, Radarsat-1, ALOS PALSAR, TerraSAR-X-1,COSMO-SkyMed 1) and forthcoming (Radarsat-2, COSMO-SkyMed 2-4, RISAT-1) civil spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems today, it is evident that the use of SAR images is no longer imited to a small research community. Moreover, these weather independent systems open new opportunities in the domain of land and sea applications, especially with respect to those sectors, where the monitoring aspect is crucial or the different levels of detail are requested.
Francesco Holecz CEO of sarmap s.a. and Bernhard Kortmann CEO of CREASO – in collaboration with AreSys and Privateers – have developed SARscape® – a modular set of functions dedicated to the generation of products based on airborne and spaceborne SAR data. SARscape® is available as an add-on to ENVI® – the software solution of CREASO GmbH and ITT Visual Information Systems – or ArcView® (ESRI Inc.). A key aspect of SARscape®, is the capability to process and combine SAR data from all past, existing, and forthcoming spaceborne systems, hence enabling to generate dedicated SAR based products containing the most comprehensive information. Thanks to the state-of the-art optical algorithms included in ENVI®, the synergy between SAR products and optical data is fully supported, making this software environment, from a remote sensing point of view, complete and powerful.
In the past three years, under studies financed by the European Space Agency, sarmap has developed a set of dedicated products for TerraSAR-X-1 and, contracted by Infoterra GmbH, has been appointed to design the processor suite for the value adding TerraSAR-X-1 processor. The knowledge derived from these projects about the capabilities and limitations of this sensor has turned into the development of advanced algorithms. This includes i.g. the anisotropic single-/multi-temporal filtering, the segmentation of very high resolution SAR images and the multi-sensor time-varying segmentation and is fully supported in SARscape® today.
Since last year CREASO GmbH distributes the software solution SARscape® for ENVI and ArcView with the help of a worldwide distribution network while sarmap ensures the high quality of all current and upcoming functionalities and the support of forthcoming sensors.
