Flight campaign Vidsel 2002 CARABAS-II change detection analysis

The airbome radar CARABAS-II conducted a data collection campaign at the RFN Vidsel test range between 30 May and 12 June 2002. Sixteen successful flight missions were flown resulting in 150 imaging passes. In this report, 64 synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) images from eleven flight missions are analyzed in order to evaluate CARABAS-II change detection performance. The operating conditions studied were changes in radar bandwidth, incidence angle, flight heading, radio-frequency interference, target orientation, and target size. The change detection processing scheme was intentionally kept uncomplicated and consistent, i.e. to ensure a robust performance across all of the operating conditions being investigated. The main general results showed that change detection performance improved when the processed bandwidth increased. Furthermore, performance improved when target size increased, but dropped when the incidence angle increased.