Welcome Message of the General Chairmen
On behalf of the EUSAR Organising Committee, we welcome you to the 30-year anniversary edition of the EUSAR conference in Baden-Baden. For three decades EUSAR has traced current developments and future directions of earth-observation imaging radar, establishing an active, well-connected network of researchers and practitioners. We encourage you to seize every opportunity to exchange ideas, discuss challenges and expand your contacts.
The importance of SAR for governments, scientists, industry and everyday life has grown enormously. Besides the growing demand for numerous institutional missions, a rapid ramp-up of new initiatives that provide commercial data at significant scale have made resilient, responsive, reliable data sources increasingly relevant. This popularisation of SAR makes the community act diversely: providing more capable institutional systems and solutions with shorter development cycles at lower costs. We are delighted that Dr. Dietmar Pilz will share ESA's view on SAR's technical evolution in our first keynote. Multistatic observation is gaining momentum, introducing new challenges in synchronisation and phase referencing across distributed platforms; this will be addressed by our second keynote, Dr. Eric Villard, who brings an "outside" perspective from his work in radio astronomy at the European Southern Observatory. Because growing capabilities generate huge data volumes, automation is essential; consequently, AI techniques are emerging as a dominant trend in SAR data exploitation. Prof. Michael Schmitt will present his perspective on this development.
Based on the evaluation of the Technical Programme Committee (TPC), this year's edition of EUSAR has accepted around 330 contributions-invited talks, regular papers and posters. We enjoy excellent international participation and a broad, diverse programme. This programme is built around invited sessions covering recently commissioned space-borne SAR missions such as NISAR, BIOMASS and ALOS-4, as well as updates on operational missions like Sentinel-1, Cosmo-SkyMED and TanDEM-X. Also spaceborne missions under implementation and new mission ideas will be covered e.g. by Harmony, national missions developed under ESA supervision, interplanetary SAR missions, ROSE-L. We will address emerging topics such as AI, RF-interference and UAV-based SAR. Contributions on relevant technologies are highlighted in two invited sessions on SAR front-ends and back-ends. The regular sessions, of course, cover the traditional topics of SAR applications, image processing and calibration, as well as multistatic and interferometric systems. A large number of important contributions will be presented as posters during the Wet Poster Session on Tuesday evening, providing an opportunity for in-depth discussion with the authors. You are invited to vote for the best SAR image displayed during the conference and we appreciate the effort of the independent awards committee organised by Prof. Lombardo and their careful considerations to select the best paper, best poster and the three best student papers. The winners will be announced during the Awards Ceremony during the closing session on Thursday afternoon.
Take the opportunity to celebrate the EUSAR anniversary with the conference dinner at the historic Kurhaus Baden-Baden, located near the famous casino. We are grateful to the city of Baden-Baden for hosting us this year. The congress centre provides an ideal location, and many hotels are within walking distance, allowing you to extend your stay and enjoy the city with friends and colleagues. Baden-Baden has been known as the Summer Capital of Europe since the 19th century, a place where scientists, artists and political leaders have met for informal exchanges. This week we continue that tradition, advancing ideas through collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking in our field. If you have spare time, consider visiting the famous Frieder Burda Museum, just around the corner, or exploring the nearby Black Forest.
Finally, we thank all authors for their contributions and the entire TPC for their thorough and timely reviews. We also thank the chairs of the invited sessions for organising and coordinating the contributions, and all session chairs for their availability throughout the conference. Thanks to Dr. Matthias Weiß and the tutorial speakers we can offer interesting SAR tutorials on Monday. We appreciate the support of all sponsors and exhibitors, and thank Arturo Arango-Selga for his leadership as chair of the exhibition. Special thanks go to Jens Fischer for his excellent support on all EDAS topics, drawing on his experience from previous EUSAR conferences and his communication with the publication bodies, and to Nicolas Parisel for his prompt responses to any issues and his support for the authors.
We wish you an enjoyable conference-meet your peers, share your thoughts with the authors and presenters, and engage in fruitful discussions!
