The Characteristics of the Multipath Scattering and the Application for Geometry Extraction in High-Resolution SAR Images

Due to the special principle of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), SAR images exhibit many special phenomena. This becomes more obvious on high-resolution (HR) SAR images, as much more details are contained. We firmly believe that these details are where the advantages of a SAR image lie on and they provide some key clues for building the framework to understand SAR images. It comes to our attention that many special details in SAR images are due to the mechanism of multipath (MP) scattering. Dominated by the synthetic aperture progress, MP scattering reveals many interesting properties in SAR images. In this paper, we first analyze the mechanism of MP scattering by using the ray perspective on typical structure units. The main characteristics of the MP scattering in the SAR image are presented, such as the offset, prolong, segment, and blurring. Then, the analysis is extended to typical structures with MP scattering, such as bridges, buildings, and oil tanks by using Terra-SAR images. Finally, we explore the utilization of characteristics of MP scattering on geometry extraction from HR SAR images. The results prove the validity and the precision of our analysis. Some advices are also provided on the applications of the characteristics of the MP scattering in the SAR image. It is expected that this paper is helpful for the SAR image understanding and application.