Case Study: Automated SAR Utility Rating Estimator (ASURE)
Under a DARPA Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) contract, Observera developed a system for automatically performing image quality and utility ratings on Global Hawk, TSAR, and APY-6 SAR imagery. The system is extensible to other SAR sensors. The ASURE system utilizes digital image quality metrics (DIQMs) to automatically assess SAR image quality in the areas of focus, noise, contrast/brightness, and artifacts. The DIQMs, along with collection geometry information, are then used in an image quality equation to provide an estimate of radar NIIRS for the image. The ASURE system was designed to operate as an unattended “black box”. It operates on magnitude SAR images (vs. complex) as they arrive and provides the DIQM ratings and a NIIRS estimate, within 5 seconds of arrival for APY-6 imagery and within 2 minutes of arrival for Global Hawk images.