Products/services > SARTool

The amazing potentiality of high resolution satellite radar imagery to operationally observe oceans and shores all around the world at an extremely high resolution regardless of meteorological conditions and solar illumination has now been widely demonstrated. Up to the highest resolution scale, SAR imagery offers the unique opportunity to provide qualitative and quantitative information for environmental and security purpose. Thus, it becomes evident that intuitive tools must be designed for non-expert end-users to avoid that SAR images remain far under-exploited.

Since the beginning of the 90’s, the BOOST team has developed a remarkable experience on marine applications derived from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data processing an analysis. Taking advantage of this unique experience, our scientists developed a powerful software designed to produce value-added information from SAR marine scenes acquired by various satellite missions (ERS, ENVISAT, RADARSAT): SARTool

This IDL-based user friendly software integrates a GUI which enables to read, visualize and process any type of path-oriented SAR images. Based on the very advanced semi/fully automatic processing algorithms, most of the SAR marine applications are addressed:

• Geo-referenced maps of detected oil polluted areas
• List of detected ships including geographical position, size, route and speed (depending upon type of SAR product)
• Local SAR inverted wave spectrum from complex products including swell wavelength, propagation direction and significant wave height
• Wind fields at various resolution scales

SARTool makes the perfect demonstration of the wide capabilities of SAR imagery over marine scenes. We use it now routinely for research and analysis purpose. It enables to quickly produce reliable outputs on marine applications.

SARTool common features:

• Support CEOS (ERS, RADARSAT) and ENVISAT ASAR formats for all path-oriented images: Single Look Complex image, Precision Image Mode-like products, and burst mode products (ScanSAR, Wide Swath, Alternate polarization)
• Basic Image processing: Intensity min and max clipping, histogram equalization, correction for typical intensity attenuation over marine scenes (“Nice display” function)
• Data (Image, spectra, geophysical outputs) can be passed on command line for user-defined analysis
• Supports several output graphical formats at each level of analysis (JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, Postscript)

Geo-referencing and mapping features

• Distance and bearing between two points and visualization of the extracted profile
• Display false colour land/sea image
• Supports overlay of geographical grid, shoreline or bathymetry
• Supports various projection methods

Full resolution specific features:

• Vertical/horizontal profiles at cursor position. Zooming function using mouse wheel
• Statistical analysis:
• Calculation of moments, Pearson Diagram.
• Law adjustment can be included as an optional statistical toolbox.
• Spectral analysis with interactive display settings (zoom, number of levels ,etc):
• Two-dimensional SAR image spectrum including both real and imaginary parts for SLC data, range spectrum, azimuth spectrum
• Azimuth cut-off estimation
• Multi-looks extraction (complex images only)
• Different filtering windows
• Sequential visualization

Marine applications features

• Oil Spill Detection based on gradient/region segmentation: Geographical position, area
• Ship detection with automatic report production :
• Position, size, route and speed (in case of visible wakes)
• Efficient ghost targets removal
• SAR-inverted wave field retrieval (SLC products only)
• Peak wavelength, propagation direction, Significant wave height
• Wind field retrievals (VV and HH products) based on scatterometry approach
• Supports various empirical scattering models
• Supports various wind direction inputs:
• Extrapolation from local directions manually entered by the user
• Spectral analysis in the low wave-number domain
• Ancillary data (models, scatterometers)

A brochure of SARTool is also available in PDF format