Situational awareness in urban areas using space borne SAR

Monitoring of human activities is one of the main topics for situational awareness in urbanized terrain. High resolution space borne SAR sensors are especially suitable for detecting changes related to these activities. A drawback of SAR imagery is the poor ability to recognize the detected changes. A workflow is introduced for the characterisation of detected changes that uses existing optical imagery, geographical and context information. Above mentioned approach is illustrated in case studies for urban areas on basis of recent multi-date Radarsat fine beam imagery, TerraSAR-X spotlight data and highresolution optical satellite imagery.