Adelaide’s contingent to 2009 IGARSS consisted of one person from Apogee, and two from DSTO (Defence Science and Technology Organisation), with both Apogee and DSTO presenting on Synthetic Aperture Radar applications.
SAR formed a key theme for papers presented at this year’s IGARSS in Cape Town. Apogee presented its capability in maritime surveillance using SAR, an overview of the Australian IFSAR campaign to generate wide area precision elevation models, and the R&D work on the use of TerraSAR-X dual polarimetry for Agribusiness.
Sunny afternoon lunch at the IGARSS 2009
Other areas presented on were: MODIS, as it is proudly celebrating 10 years of nearly flawless operation, ASTER archive being used to create a Global DEM on a scale finer than the publicly available SRTM and covering greater extents in the northern and southern regions of the globe.
Many of the sessions discussed continuing remote sensing issues, such as classification, and brought new techniques such as Intrinsic Mode Functions and Multiple Kernel SVM (MKL) to bear to understand the spatial and spectral characteristics of generated classes. Classification of Complex SAR data received special attention since standard statistical methods focus on real valued input variables; one of the methods presented used a semi-supervised approach with deterministic annealing to determine the classes of interest followed by an extending neural network to classify and capture most significant characteristics of each class using the hidden layer in the neural network.
Some impressive large and visionary projects were also showcased. These include country wide Permanent Scatterer Insar measurement for Italy, an ambitious project which uses ERS and ENVISAT-ASAR time series to track the land elevation change trends over all of Italy. The Tandem-X project for generating a global DEM using satellite based single pass X-band INSAR and repeated passes to achieve accuracy. And the Sentinel-1 C-band SAR from ESA, which will continuously collect data in Interferometric Wide Swath mode over land and make it available without cost to the remote sensing community.
Another area where radar received a lot of attention was in soil moisture retrieval. In preparation for the SMAP mission which will contain an L-band radiometer and SAR, there is a flurry of activity in developing models for reliably retrieving soil moisture from this data. Models range from gross simplifications such as log-linear relationships to backscatter and emission to detailed ones accounting for vegetation transmissivity to retrieve soil moisture under a canopy.
South Africa, as the host nation, showed that it is not far behind in the space race. It has state-of-art facilities including clean rooms, calibration chambers and is planning to launch SumbandillaSat. CSIR, the South African space agency is coming to the forefront again in the post apartheid era and demonstrated its expertise.
Overall the conference demonstrated the vitality of the Remote Sensing and Geospatial research community, a rapidly advancing technology and how it is influencing global decision making in dynamic and difficult to access parts of the world, especially in Africa.
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