Abstract
Medium-resolution SAR satellite data have been widely used for water and flood mapping in recent years. Since the beginning of 2008 high-resolution radar data with up to 1 m pixel spacing of the TerraSAR-X satellite are operationally available. Due to the improved resolution of the sensor more details of the Earth’s surface become visible. A number of different appearances of water bodies in TerraSAR-X data are shown that are relevant for a general water mapping concept. Existing water body detection approaches that have been applied to medium-resolution SAR data are reviewed with regard to their applicability for TerraSAR-X data. As a complementary mission to TerraSAR-X the launch of TanDEM-X is planned for October 2009. The data of both satellites will be used to generate a global DEM (Digital Elevation Model) with an interferometric data acquisition concept. As a byproduct to the DEM data set a global water mask will be derived from the SAR data. The concept for this water detection process within the TanDEM-X project is introduced in this paper.
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Acknowledgement
This work is mainly funded by the German Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (BMBF) in the context of the RIMAX Research Programme (Risk Management of Extreme Flood Events), sub-project SAR-HQ (grant ref. nr.: 0330719). Thanks to German Aerospace Center (DLR) for providing TerraSAR-X data within the project nr. HYD0326. Finally, the authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments which greatly improved the paper.
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Hahmann, T., Twele, A., Martinis, S., Buchroithner, M. (2010). Strategies for the Automatic Extraction of Water Bodies from TerraSAR-X / TanDEM-X data. In: Konecny, M., Zlatanova, S., Bandrova, T. (eds) Geographic Information and Cartography for Risk and Crisis Management. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03442-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03442-8_9
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