A fidelity simulator for forest region based on actual working process of SAR remote sensing

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) simulation of forest region is a powerful tool for understanding the mechanism of remote sensing, testing new applications and devising inversion algorithms of forest structure. The common approaches used to simulate images of forest region are lack of the ability to be faithful to the actual characteristics of the remote sensing systems. This paper presents a fidelity simulator for forest region based on actual working process of SAR remote sensing to meet the nonideal features in actual conditions. The simulator considers raw echoes generating and image focusing process with various kinds of uncertain factors including trajectory deviations, attitude dithering, calibration error, noises. The simulator is verified by comparing with E-SAR data via Polarization Coherence Tomography (PCT) process. The results indicate the simulated images have the similar features with E-SAR images. Further applications of the simulator are also discussed and take simulation of trajectory deviation as an application example.