Open Foris SAR Toolkit-Free and Open Source Command Line Utilities for Automatized SAR Data Pre-Processing

In this paper, we present the Open Foris SAR Toolkit (OFST). OFST is a set of command line tools that focus on the automation for the (pre-) processing of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data in order to obtain higher level data products that are ready-to-use for classification and related subsequent tasks. For the actual SAR processing steps it uses the algorithms implemented in the Sentinel Applications Platform (SNAP) provided by ESA. Since the provision is free and open and no prior knowledge on SAR processing is necessary, we presume that the tools can help to enlarge the uptake of SAR data by non-experts. Furthermore, the high degree of automation makes it easy to integrate the tools into web-based processing services that can deal with the resource demanding handling of the imagery. By now the tools support the (pre-) processing of ALOS PALSAR and Sentinel-1 data. Some examples from large-area wall-to-wall mapping show that despite the complexity of SAR processing it is possible to automatically retrieve useful datasets for different applications.