The Recent Advances of Data Imaging and Fusion Processing for Airborne X-SAR with High Resolution

X-SAR system is the airborne imaging radar with multi-mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) at high-resolution, interferometer and full-polarization, which has been developed by the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth (RADI), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), funded by the CAS Large Research Infrastructures. The first-stage form 2009 to 2015, X-SAR was successfully implemented to an operational SAR in X-band with high resolution (up to 0.5 m). The system performances and data imaging quality have verified by the flight tests. Many valuable results of the visual interpretation in typical images, particularly SAR image fusion processing have emphasized the X-SAR's target recognition capabilities. This paper presents the core characteristics of X-SAR images, having achieved by the spatial resolution optimized by low side-lobe, exact geographical precision and radiometric accuracy. The visual inspection of typical targets in example images is described such as the surface of desert hill, the vehicle discrimination and aircraft recognition. Meanwhile, the image fusion processing for target recognition has been implemented. The recent advances of SAR-optical image fusion used to target classification and SAR-SAR image fusion processing for change detection are also presented.