Absolute Geolocation of Corner Reflectors Using High-Resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

Abstract:

This paper introduced the geolocation equations and solution procedures of synthetic aperture radar （SAR） imaging geodesy in details， and conducted precise positioning of point targets in SAR images based on the weigh-centroid method. Regarding to the poor geolocation accuracy and solution stability caused by very short spatial baselines with single track SAR images， a height constraint was added to the geolocation model. By adopting multiple high-resolution TerraSAR-X and Sentinel-1 SAR images， the absolute geolocation was implemented to six corner reflectors（CRs） located at Wuhan and Shanghai， respectively. The experiments demonstrate that the absolute geolocation accuracy of CRs at centimeter-level can be achieved by using TerraSAR-X SAR images， and decimeter-level positioning accuracy by using Sentinel-1 SAR images.

Key words:synthetic aperture radar;corner reflectors(CRs);absolute geolocation;TerraSAR-X;Sentinel-1A/B