Simulating SCN and MSSR modes of RADARSAT-2 for ship and iceberg discrimination

A tool developed for simulating RADARSAT-2 (RS2) Maritime Satellite Surveillance Radar (MSSR) mode data from higher resolution data is described. RS2 Fine and Fine Quad images containing validated ship and iceberg targets were resampled to low resolution ScanSAR Narrow (SCN) and MSSR mode data. This tool can be adopted to use other image modes as inputs and simulate other outputs as well and the simulated products are used to develop a ship and iceberg discriminator for those modes. A series of tests were applied to verify the accuracy of the backscatter characteristics of the simulated products and the performance of the target discriminator are presented for SCN and MSSR mode Ocean Surveillance, Very wide swath, Near incidence (OSVN)[1]. Since there was a very limited ship data suitable for simulating MSSR mode available, only a demonstration of MSSR OSVN classifier was included.