The simulation of SAR images provides valuable information used inmany fields such as mission planning or the design of feature extraction algorithms. Simulation is in generala trade-off between achievement of approximation to reality as closeas possible and minimization of computational load respectively processingtime. For real-time application, a fast but suboptimal approach might be optimal,whereas for thorough parameter tuning of image processing or image analysis algorithms, more sophisticatedmethods would be required. In this paper, three SAR simulators using different simulation concepts tailoredfor a variety of tasks are introduced and the simulation results for simple building models and complex urban scenesare compared. To evaluate the realism of the simulation methods, the results are compared to a real SARimage of an urban scene. On this basis the possibilities and limitations of the different SAR simulation conceptsare discussed.     «

The simulation of SAR images provides valuable information used inmany fields such as mission planning or the design of feature extraction algorithms. Simulation is in generala trade-off between achievement of approximation to reality as closeas possible and minimization of computational load respectively processingtime. For real-time application, a fast but suboptimal approach might be optimal,whereas for thorough parameter tuning of image processing or image analysis algorithms, more sophistic...     »