Remote moisture quantification of concrete using SAR images and the K-R-I transform

Subsurface moisture content in Portland cement concrete structures indicates the short-term (cement hydration) and long-term (durability) of these structures and can be used in the nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and structural health monitoring (SHM) of concrete structures. Subsurface moisture content of concrete structures provides insightful health-related information such as the potential of steel rebar corrosion and alkali-silica reaction (ASR) inside concrete. However, existing approaches for moisture measurement are either intrusive (e.g., embedded moisture sensors) or not applicable in the field (e.g., gamma-ray attenuation, neutron scattering). This paper presents a field-applicable, NDE technique for characterizing subsurface moisture content of concrete specimens, based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. Laboratory concrete specimens made of three water-to-cement (w/c) ratios (0.4, 0.5, and 0.55) were cast and conditioned to create various moisture contents in the range of 0% (oven-dried) to 4% (saturated). Concrete specimens were inspected by a 10GHz SAR imaging sensor to generate radar images for predicting both the w/c ratio and moisture content of each specimen. From our experimental data, it is found that the amplitude of SAR images can be used to predict the moisture content of concrete specimens. It is also found that critical contour area (distribution of SAR amplitudes) of SAR images increases with the increase of moisture content, serving as a useful indicator for subsurface moisture distribution inside concrete. An empirical model capable of predicting both the w/c ratio and moisture content from an SAR image is proposed. Research approach is finally summarized in a procedure for future applications.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is one of the radar NDE techniques used for remote sensing of civil infrastructures. SAR imaging has been used for remote detection of moisture content, chloride content, and steel rebar corrosion in concrete specimens. Parameters extracted from SAR images are used for condition assessment, including integrated SAR amplitude (Iint), average maximum SAR amplitude (Iavg), and critical contour area (Ac). The objective of this paper is to investigate the effects of moisture and chloride content on the interdependency of critical contour area with integrated SAR amplitude and average maximum SAR amplitude. Laboratory portland cement concrete panel specimens of different water-to-cement (w/c) ratios (0.4, 0.5, and 0.55) were manufactured and scanned inside an electromagnetic anechoic chamber during the drying process of the specimens. From our result, it was found that the interdependency of critical contour area with integrated SAR amplitude and average maximum SAR amplitude during moisture variation is different from the one during chloride variation for different w/c ratios.

The usage of a hypersonic platform for remote sensing application has promising prospects, especially for hypersonic platform-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. However, the high-speed of hypersonic platform will lead to extreme friction between the platform and air, which will cause the ionization of air. The ionized gas forms the plasma sheath wrapped around the hypersonic platform. The plasma sheath will severely affect the propagation of SAR signal and further affect the SAR imaging. Therefore, hypersonic platform-borne SAR imaging should be studied from a physical perspective. In this paper, hypersonic platform-borne SAR imaging under plasma sheath is analyzed. The SAR signal propagation in plasma sheath is computed using scatter matrix method. The proposed SAR signal model is verified by using a ground experiment system. Moreover, the effect of attenuation caused by plasma sheath on SAR imaging is studied under different SAR parameters and plasma sheath. The result shows that attenuation caused by plasma sheath will degrade the SAR imaging quality and even cause the point and area targets to be submerged into the noise. The real SAR images under plasma sheath also illustrate this phenomenon. Furthermore, by studying imaging results under different SAR and plasma parameters, it can be concluded that the severe degradation of SAR imaging quality appears at condition of high plasma sheath electron density and low SAR carrier frequency. The work in this paper will be beneficial for the study of hypersonic platform-borne SAR imaging and design of hypersonic SAR imaging systems in the future.

In general, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging and image processing are two sequential steps in SAR image processing. Due to the large size of SAR images, most image processing algorithms require image segmentation before processing. However, the existence of speckle noise in SAR images, as well as poor contrast and the uneven distribution of gray values in the same target, make SAR images difficult to segment. In order to facilitate the subsequent processing of SAR images, this paper proposes a new method that combines the back-projection algorithm (BPA) and a first-order gradient operator to enhance the edges of SAR images to overcome image segmentation problems. For complex-valued signals, the gradient operator was applied directly to the imaging process. The experimental results of simulated images and real images validate our proposed method. For the simulated scene, the supervised image segmentation evaluation indexes of our method have more than 1.18%, 11.2% and 11.72% improvement on probabilistic Rand index (PRI), variability index (VI), and global consistency error (GCE). The proposed imaging method will make SAR image segmentation and related applications easier.

This paper proposes a novel method on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Image denoising, which is based on context modeling combined with multiscale orthogonal bandlet coefficients. For the main influence of SAR image is multiplicative speckle noise, the logarithm uniform transform is used to convert it to additive noise. In this paper, the multiscale orthogonal bandlet transform is applied to noisy SAR Image. The contextual model is used to compute contextual values of bandlet coefficients on each scale. Therefore, bandlet coefficients are reconstructed into some parts by contextual values. The spatially adaptive soft-threshold (T) is to denoise SAR image in each part. Experimental results demonstrate that this method outperforms the methods of Ehance-Lee (E-lee), contextual model based on wavelet domain (Wavelet-context), and Hidden Markov Tree model bases on wavelet domain (Wavelet-hmt) on there indexes: Floating index (FI), Standard deviation and Edge saving index of vertical direction, by using a real SAR image. However, the method can not only reduce the speckle noise but also preserve edges and high frequency information, and gets considerable visual effect on SAR Image denoising.

A novel three-step method to reduce speckle in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is presented. First, an edge detector is used to detect the edge orientations in SAR images. Second, using a data processing method named empirical mode decomposition, the SAR image is smoothed along four directions: horizontal, vertical, left diagonal and right diagonal, respectively. Third, the SAR image is reconstructed such that if the edge direction is horizontal, the pixel smoothed along the horizontal direction is used to reconstruct the image, and so on; if an edge is not detected, the mean of the four directionally smoothed images is used to reconstruct the image. Application of this method to SAR images has shown that it is well balanced in the quality of visual appearance, mean preservation, edge preservation, and reduction of the standard deviation.

ABSTRACTThe speckle noise of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images limits its application in change detection. Compared with improved ratio (IR) and log-ratio (LR) operators, the neighborhood-based ratio (NR) technique can restrain the influence of speckle noise and is more suitable for change detection in SAR images. However, we find three drawbacks of NR by analyzing this method carefully. To overcome these defects, we propose an improved neighborhood-based ratio (INR) approach for change detection in SAR images. INR restructures the NR operator to exploit the neighborhood information more reasonably and is expected to reduce the impact of speckle noise better. IR, LR, mean ratio operator, NR, and INR are tested on two data sets to compare their performances in change detection of SAR images. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain better difference image than other state-of-art methods and improve the accuracy of change detection in SAR images effectively.

We address the application of model-supported exploitation techniques to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. The emphasis is on monitoring SAR imagery using wide area 2D and/or 3D site models along with contextual information. We consider here the following tasks useful in monitoring: (a) site model construction using segmentation and labeling techniques, (b) target detection, (c) target classification and indexing, and (d) SAR image-site model registration. The 2-D wide area site models used here for SAR image exploitation differ from typical site models developed for RADIUS applications, in that they do not model specific facilities, but constitute wide area site models of cultural features such as urban clutter areas, roads, clearings, fields, etc. These models may be derived directly from existing site models, possibly constructed from electro-optical (EO) observations. When such models are not available, a set of segmentation and labeling techniques described here can be used for the construction of 2D site models. The use of models can potentially yield critical information which can disambiguate target signatures in SAR images. We address registration of SAR and EO images to a common site model. Specific derivations are given for the case of registration within the RCDE platform. We suggest a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection scheme and a topographic primal sketch (TPS) based classification scheme for monitoring target occurrences in SAR images. The TPS of an observed target is matched against candidate targets TPSs synthesized for the preferred target orientation, inferred from context (e.g. road or parking lot targets). Experimental results on real and synthetic SAR images are provided.

In single band and single polarized synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, the information is limited to intensity and texture only and it is very difficult to interpret such SAR images without any a priori information. For unsupervised classification of SAR images, M-band wavelet decomposition is performed on the SAR image and sub-band selection on the basis of energy levels is applied to improve the classification results since sparse representation of sub-bands degrades the performance of classification. Then, textural features are obtained from selected sub-bands and integrated with intensity features. An adaptive neuro-fuzzy algorithm is used to improve computational efficiency by extracting significant features. K-means classification is performed on the extracted features and land features are labeled. This classification algorithm involves user defined parameters. To remove the user dependency and to obtain maximum achievable classification accuracy, an algorithm is developed in this paper for classification accuracy in terms of the parameters involved in the segmentation process. This is very helpful to develop the automated land-cover monitoring system with SAR, where optimized parameters are to be identified only once and these parameters can be applied to SAR imagery of the same scene obtained year after year. A single band, single polarized SAR image is classified into water, urban and vegetation areas using this method and overall classification accuracy is obtained in the range of 85.92%–93.70% by comparing with ground truth data.

Ship detection from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is a hot topic, but the difficulty in collecting labeled SAR images may hinder the development of deep-learning-based detection methods. Inspired by the idea of domain adaptation, in this article, we propose a hierarchical similarity alignment neural network (HSANet) for ship detection in SAR images, which is a domain adaptive (DA) approach with optical remote sensing images as training samples. The kernel target of HSANet is to mine and align both the global structure and the local instance information between SAR and optical images, where two modules, structural alignment module (SAM) and prototype alignment module (PAM), are designed to, respectively, conduct two hierarchies of alignment process. In general, SAM attempts to extract the global structure similarity which exists in image-level feature representation, while PAM tends to extract the local shape similarity which is instance-level representation. To be specific, SAM is developed by Fourier-based feature alignment, which tries to describe the similar structural relationship between optical and SAR images. Meanwhile, PAM is proposed based on the conjoint confidence analysis where the instance-level ship representations of the source and target domains is aligned. SAM and PAM work together to construct a hierarchical domain adaptation network for SAR ship detection. Experiments on several public datasets may indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

It is expensive and time-consuming to obtain a large number of labeled synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In the task of small training data size, the results of target detection on SAR images using deep network approaches are usually not ideal. In this study, considering that optical remote sensing images are much easier to be labeled than SAR images, we assume to have a large number of labeled optical remote sensing images and a small number of labeled SAR images with the similar scenes, propose to transfer knowledge from optical remote sensing images to SAR images, and develop a domain adaptive Faster R-CNN for SAR target detection with small training data size. In the proposed method, in order to make full use of the label information and realize more accurate domain adaptation knowledge transfer, an instance level domain adaptation constraint is used rather than feature level domain adaptation constraint. Specifically, generative adversarial network (GAN) constraint is applied as the domain adaptation constraint in the adaptation module after the proposals of Faster R-CNN to achieve instance level domain adaptation and learn the transferable features. The experimental results on the measured SAR image dataset show that the proposed method has higher detection accuracy in the task of SAR target detection with small training data size than the traditional Faster R-CNN.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image segmentation is the key to SAR image automatic interpretation. However, speckle noise, intensity inhomogeneity, and irregular shaped objects with changing edge often make the SAR image segmentation very difficult, and existing algorithms have high computational complexity. We propose a region-based level set method using the local image intensity information. To represent the statistical characteristics of speckle noise, we first use a gamma statistical distribution to model every segmented SAR image. We then apply a modified region mean estimation formula to efficiently segment SAR images with inhomogeneity. Finally, Gaussian filtering is employed to regularize the level set function, which can avoid reinitialization. The experimental results on synthetic and real-world SAR images demonstrate that the proposed method has less computation cost, faster convergence rate, and more accurate segmentation results.

Azimuth resolution improvement for spaceborne SAR images with quasi-non-overlapped Doppler bandwidth

In high-resolution (HR) and very-high resolution (VHR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, focus is now on the patch-oriented image categorization in contrast to the pixel-based classification in low-resolution SAR images. SAR image categorization requires the generation of a compact feature descriptor that accurately defines the content of the image patch under consideration. In this paper we propose a parametric feature descriptor generated on the complex-valued SAR image within a transformation space. The fractional Fourier transform (FrFT), has been considered to transform the image pixels of the single-look complex (SLC) SAR images in order to obtain a simpler statistical response. The real and imaginary components of the complex-valued FrFT coefficients have been modelled with generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD). The proposed feature descriptor is compared with a Wavelet-decomposition-based parametric feature descriptor; and with the FrFT-based and Gabor-filter-bank-based non-parametric feature descriptors. Categorization accuracy enhancement is demonstrated over several categories comprising of natural topologies. The experimental database consists of 2000 image patches (of size 200 × 200 pixels) extracted from SLC HR TerraSAR-X scenes.

In this paper, we propose a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection algorithm based on SAR image nonstationary analysis and conditional random field (CRF) model. This algorithm segments the SAR images into two nonstationary regions with the Triplet Markov Field (TMF) model which incorporates a U field to describe the images' nonstationary nature. The combined posterior probability of the CRF model consists of two parts: the unary potential and the pairwise potential. The unary potential is modeled by support vector machine (SVM) using the texture features extracted from the two-temporal SAR images, and the pairwise potential is constructed by the multilevel logistical model to capture the spatial interactions of the log-ratio image. Both the unary and pairwise potentials are improved with the introduction of the U field. The parameters of the pairwise potential are estimated by the iterative conditional estimation (ICE) algorithm. The iterative conditional model (ICM) algorithm is utilized for updating the combined posterior probability, and the final change detection results are obtained when it converges. Finally, experimental results on four two-temporal SAR images validate the effectiveness of the proposed image change detection algorithm.