MATCHING MAP FEATURES TO SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR (SAR) IMAGES USING TEMPLATE MATCHING

The feasibility of matching templates representing map features to features in Synthetic Aperture Radar images is investigated. The performance of template matching using cross-correlation (which has no knowledge of speckle) is compared with a correlation measure, based on a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test of fit, which does take speckle into consideration. This is shown to perform better than cross-correlation in simulated images. However, neither method performs well on real data. This is due to the exponential speckle model being inappropriate for linear features in real data. Alternative methods for matching map features to SAR images are suggested.