Patent ID: 8134489

Claim:
A method for monitoring an area, comprising: providing a ground station having a single, terrestrial based antenna and a receiver in communication with the antenna, and further orienting the antenna such that the antenna has a field of view able to receive an electromagnetic wave signal reflected from a ground surface within a predetermined geographic area; transmitting a first electromagnetic wave signal from a mobile platform moving along a first predetermined path of travel over the ground surface, the first electromagnetic wave signal being transmitted toward predetermined geographic area of said ground surface; using said terrestrial based antenna oriented to receive the first electromagnetic wave signal after the first electromagnetic wave signal has been reflected from one of said ground surface or an object on the ground surface; using said receiver located remote from said mobile platform to receive said first electromagnetic wave signal from said terrestrial based antenna; using a processor remotely located from said mobile platform to process said first electromagnetic wave signal to form a first synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image; using the mobile platform to transmit a second electromagnetic wave signal toward the ground surface while the mobile platform is moving along a second predetermined path of travel at least substantially the same as the first predetermined path of travel; subsequently using the terrestrial based antenna to receive the second electromagnetic wave signal transmitted from the mobile platform after the second electromagnetic wave signal has been reflected from one of the ground surface or the object; subsequently using said receiver to receive said second electromagnetic wave signal from said terrestrial based antenna at a time subsequent to transmission of said first electromagnetic wave signal; using said processor to process said second electromagnetic wave signal to obtain a second SAR image; and using said processor to analyze pixels making up each of said first and second SAR images to determine areas of non-correlation between said images.