Investigation for planimetric accuracy of airborne synthetic aperture radar

The airborne SAR images were tested for geometric accuracy in order to assess the suitability of present airborne radar systems for topographic mapping. Images were transformed to terrain coordinate system using 2-D conformal, affine and polynomial transformations. Standard error in positional discrepancies at check points show that the geometric fidelity of present airborne SAR system is compatible with planimetric mapping requirements at 1∶50,000 and smaller scale.