Power transmission tower monitoring technology based on TerraSAR-X products

Synthetic aperture radar signal can propagate through hazardous weather and atmospheric conditions with heavy capabilities of SARs have attracted significant interest in remote sensing communities. The high-resolutions radar satellite missions like TerraSAR-X has launched in June 2007 and the images reach 1 m in azimuth and range in spotlight mode. Due to the high resolution, the detailed information of the observed scene we can distinguish from the TerraSAR-X HS mode image according to the SAR geometry of single-look slant-range complex data. This paper is concerned with the technique of how to use spaceborne SAR technology in a wide range of natural disaster conditions to monitor the power grid's security in particular. The power transmission tower in HS mode product is very distinguishable and the reflected forms of them are no longer point targets, so the extraction of tower height can be achieved from the single image of SSC product. At last the status of power transmission tower can be assessed based on the result of height extraction in the emergency response for the sudden natural public Disaster.