AlignSAR

The AlignSAR project aims to provide FAIR-guided open datasets and tools designed for SAR applications, ensuring interoperability and consistency with existing and upcoming initiatives and technologies. The project facilitates a wider exploitation of SAR data and its integration and combination with other datasets. The project aims to achieve the following objectives: (1) Define a procedure for creating SAR benchmark datasets for machine learning applications. (2) Develop a reference, quality-controlled, documented, open database of SAR spatial and temporal signatures of complex real-world targets with high diversity to serve a wide range of applications with societal relevance. The database will respect FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reproducible) and Open Science principles. (3) Create the database considering both open and closed SAR missions (including at minimum Sentinel-1), maximizing the geographical and temporal coverage, and integrating and aligning multi-SAR images and other geodetic measurements in time and space. (4) Define a specification of the signatures and their associated descriptors so that they can be easily indexed, programmatically searched, and retrieved. (5) Develop an open-source software library with associated documentation to create, describe, test, validate, and publish SAR signatures, and expand the database. (6) Demonstrate, test, and validate the Open SAR Library (database and open-source software) on at least two use cases for machine learning applications. (7) Ensure long-term availability of the database and open-source library, potentially through integration with other relevant open platforms and tools. The project is funded from the European Space Agency in response to the ITT ESA AO/1-11394/22/I-DT. Lead Partner: University of Twente, The Netherlands Partners: University of Leeds, United Kingdom; AGH UST, Poland; RHEA Group, Italy Start date (Y-m): 2023-02 End date (Y-m): 2024-02 www.alignsar.nl