ICEYE, the global leader in radar satellite persistent monitoring of the planet and an expert in natural catastrophe solutions, has announced a new imaging mode known as Dwell.
With Dwell, ICEYE synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites remain focused on a specific point on the ground for an extended collection time. This long-duration imaging mode will allow ICEYE satellites to capture more information about the imaging target, creating a powerful new capability for imagery users.
Under certain circumstances, Dwell can be used to determine the heading and speed of moving vehicles. Dwell would enable the discovery of human-made objects that would otherwise remain hidden under a tree canopy in the near future. Making the product unique in commercial remote sensing which will transform how customers with demanding mission requirements exploit SAR imagery.
John Cartwright, the Head of Data Product at ICEYE said, “Dwell mode is ideal for customers who need to extract more information from our radar imagery, including movement and direction. In the long term, the research community, scientists, the SAR community, and most importantly, our customers with demanding missions will benefit from this latest ICEYE innovation. This product is another element in using remote sensing to better understand and characterize what is happening and changing on the ground in all lighting and weather conditions.”
As an example to show how the product works, the company used ICEYE Dwell Mode, a Color (CSI) product to showcase aircraft at the Incheon Airport, South Korea. With this product, man-made objects were highlighted with colours, making them stand out from natural features for easier detection. The colour signature is also helped to distinguish the shapes of objects.
The Dwell image product is created from a 25-second collection of the imaging target. This is in contrast to the 10-second duration of a traditional high-resolution ICEYE Spot image.
The longer-duration collection provides new information about activity on the ground while also improving the image fidelity over a traditional SAR image. When combined with ICEYE’s day/night all-weather imaging capability and tactical responsiveness, Dwell provides an imagery capability that is superior to electro-optical collections.
The product is made up of three components the first of which is a high-fidelity SAR image. A common feature in high-resolution SAR images is speckle, which is the result of the specific SAR collection geometry and gives SAR imagery a noise-like appearance. The extended collection time for a Dwell image enables a significantly larger synthetic aperture angle and produces pixels with an along-track resolution of 5 cm. Standard processing combines pixels together, a process called ‘multi-looking’, which significantly reduces the speckle artefacts. The result is a high-fidelity image with superior interpretability.
The second component is the colour sub-aperture image. A Dwell collection is efficient at distinguishing human-made features, from natural backgrounds.
Lastly, the video is built from the multiple sub-images that comprise a Dwell collection. The video product enables the determination of vehicle heading and speed during the 25-second collection and provides additional context about activities and patterns of behaviour.
Dwell expands the powerful portfolio of high-tempo, day/night, all-weather imaging capabilities enabled by the ICEYE constellation.
ICEYE offers a wide-area collection mode called Scan for large-area search; an intermediate, higher-resolution mode called Strip for higher-resolution mapping and search, and the highest-resolution Spot and Spot Extended Area for high-confidence monitoring and mapping applications.
