Statistical Analysis of Urban Road Traffic Using Time-Series Data from High-Resolution SAR Satellites

In my undergraduate thesis, I utilised high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite data to conduct a six-year time-series analysis of traffic volume and vehicle speed on the Third Ring Road near Yezhihu, Wuhan, China. By applying the Doppler effect principle, I derived a quantitative relationship between azimuth displacement in SAR imagery and actual vehicle speed. Algorithms such as filtering and down-sampling were employed to enhance vehicle detection accuracy. Using TerraSAR-X satellite data, I automated the extraction of road vehicle targets and completed time-series statistics on vehicle counts and speeds, revealing traffic trends for the area. I also analysed the impact of noise in high-resolution SAR imagery and applied a median filtering method for denoising in time-series data, providing a feasibility study for large-scale traffic monitoring in the future.