The maritime environment observed by SAR is very complex, in which different perturbations overlap in the same appearance in surface roughness. In these conditions, moving ship detection can require advanced vessel detection techniques, that should be validated with ground truth data. In this context the data simulators can provide useful data for validation purposes.
The simulator aims to be a useful tool for the recreation of realistic conditions, being able to simulate the raw SAR data of different surfaces and targets; particularly, it is able to characterize the marine surface depending on the sea state and the wind sea. The main purpose of the simulator is to provide data for the validation of focusing techniques, Doppler parameter algorithms and moving ships detection and classification methodologies.