Spaceborne 3-D SAR Tomography for Analyzing Garbled Urban Scenarios: Single-Look Superresolution Advances and Experiments

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar Tomography (Tomo-SAR) is an emerging experimental "coherent data combination" mode allowing unprecedented full 3-D imaging of complex urban and infrastructure scenarios with layover ("garbled") scatterers, exploiting multibaseline interferometric SAR data stacks. Various approaches have been proposed to improve Fourier-based Tomo-SAR elevation beamforming which is affected by unsatisfactory height sidelobe behaviour and resolution, due to the typical low number of baselines with irregular distribution. Among these approaches, height superresolution multilook beamforming techniques proved to posses interesting capabilities, at the cost of operation with reduced horizontal resolution. In this work, a recently proposed knowledge-based baseline interpolation and the Capon and MUSIC superresolution methods are integrated in to a new Tomo-SAR processor able to offer at a low computational burden height superresolution and sidelobe cleaning with single-look data, allowing full resolution operation, as important in urban and other man-made areas. Results are reported with real ERS data.Index Terms-Electromagnetic tomography, radar interferometry, spectral analysis, synthetic aperture radar, urban areas.

Towards the Integration of SAR Tomography and PSI for Improved Deformation Assessment in Urban Areas

“…Various inversion methods have been proposed (such as [19,12,4,3]) for estimating γ (p) and p. In this work, we perform single-look conventional beamforming (which is used as the objective function for the maximisation applied for the retrieval of the unknown parameters). The estimated reflectivity is given by,…”

“…Therefore, the pixels with multiple scatterers (such as in a ground-to-facade layover) are typically rejected. SAR tomography [3,4,5] has the potential to overcome this limitation. It has the ability to retrieve the elevation and deformation parameters for multiple scatterers in the same resolution cell, as shown in different contributions such as [6,7,8,9].…”

Electromagnetic Compatibility Effects on Antenna Pattern of Spaceborne SAR

“…State-of-the-art spaceborne SAR systems have been widely applied in both military and civilian areas, such as monitoring [1], recognition [2], interferometry [3], rescue [4], tomography [5], and so on. With the development of spaceborne SAR technique, high-resolution, multifunction and miniaturization are the future development trends of spaceborne SAR, such as the small SAR satellite constellation, which is more flexible and can be used for meeting the requirement of different applications [6,7].…”

Tomography Sar Imaging Strategy Based on Block-Sparse Model

“…Much of the work on tomography SAR imaging published focused on spatial spectrum estimation methods, which provide better resolution than Fourier based methods in the height direction [7][8][9]. However, these methods are interfered by high sidelobes under non-uniform baseline distribution.…”