Open-Sourcing of a SoOp Simulator with Bistatic Vegetation Scattering Model

Conventional microwave remote sensing has been performed with mono-static active radars for decades. However, SoOp (Signal of Opportunity) has been gaining a great interest among researchers in recent years because it removes costs for a transmitter antenna by reception of existing direct and/or reflected signals. Although SoOp has produced encouraging results for the remote sensing of ocean surface roughness and wind vectors, the concept is still emerging and requires exhaustive analysis in order to be applied on land observations such as retrieval of biomass, soil moisture, surface topography, and snow depth. Bistatic analytical models and simulators can fulfill the need for analysis. They create environments that enable computation, validation, and examination of methods for future missions, which are difficult to perform in the real world experiments. Being motivated by this phenomenon, we have developed a generalized coherent forward model of bistatic scattering from vegetation cover for SoOp applications with the name SCoBi-Veg (SoOp Coherent Bistatic Scattering Model for Vegetated Terrains), which is currently under review by IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing [1] [2]. We have also developed a simulator that employs SCoBi-Veg model, for the sake of creating a medium for a community of researchers, scientists, and users with little-or-no electromagnetic background to study new methods with varying configurations, to analyze such methods, to determine the optimal cases for specific missions, to generate, visualize, and analyze test data. In fact, SCoBi is a framework that implements only the simulator for vegetated terrains (SCoBi-Veg) for now. The simulator is being open-sourced in the Matlab/Octave development environment. It takes many inputs for vegetation, antennas, ground, and preferences. It generates received field and power, reflectivity, and/or NBRCS (normalized bistatic radar cross-section) for direct, coherent (specular), and incoherent (diffuse) contributions. This paper describes the ongoing open sourcing and the capabilities of the SCoBi simulator.