Investigation of the experimental TanDEM-X pursuit monostatic mode for oil and ship detection

The German Aerospace Center has opened the TanDEM-X science phase in order to demonstrate new Synthetic Aperture Radar techniques and applications. In particular, the TanDEM-X pursuit monostatic configuration has been switched on from October 2014 till February 2015. This paper investigates the use of the two TanDEM-X satellites to acquire a pair of independent SAR data in single and multi-polarization mode for maritime surveillance applications. Multi-polarization SAR data have shown to be more effective than single-polarization one, for what concern oil spill and ship detection. Here, for the first time has been possible to directly compare almost simultaneous SAR measurements of marine slicks and targets using both single and multi-polarization data. In-situ ground truth data have been collected during satellites overpasses in order to conduct the analysis