In this paper, we investigate the potential of polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) tomography (Pol-TomoSAR) in urban applications. TomoSAR exploits the amplitude and phase of the received data and offers the possibility to resolve multiple scatters lying in the same range-azimuth resolution cell. In urban environments, this issue is very important since layover causes multiple coherent scatterers to be mapped in the same range-azimuth image pixel. To achieve reliable and accurate results, TomoSAR requires a large number of multi-baseline acquisitions which, for satellite-borne SAR systems, are collected with long time intervals. Then, accurate tomographic reconstructions would require multiple scatterers to remain stable between all the acquisitions. In this paper, an extension of a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT)-based tomographic approach, denoted as Fast-Sup-GLRT, to the polarimetric data case is introduced, with the purpose of investigating if, in urban applications, the use of polarimetric channels allows for reduction of the number of baselines required to achieve a given scatterer's detection performance. The results presented show that the use of dual polarization data allows the proposed detector to work in an equivalent or better way than use of a double number of independent single polarization channels. single bounce, double bounce, and volume scattering mechanisms [3]. For urban areas, the polarimetric scattering mechanisms are more complicated with respect to natural areas, due to the high variability of materials, and forms and sizes of the objects laying in the observed ground scene. Different approaches using fully polarimetric SAR data have been recently proposed [4]. In [4] the double bounce scattering form, the dihedral structure formed by the wall and the ground of a building, or the single bounce scattering from the roof or the wall, is considered, for a deterministic extraction of urban areas. However, the rotated dihedral scattering of a building, with a large orientation angle with respect to the radar look direction, results in a strong cross polarization component that can be misdetected as vegetation volume scattering [5].An alternative approach for urban area monitoring is SAR tomography (TomoSAR). TomoSAR [6] extends the conventional two-dimensional SAR imaging principle to three dimensions by forming an additional synthetic aperture in elevation, using a stack of multi-baseline interferometric images. A fully 3-D scene reflectivity profile along azimuth, range, and elevation is provided. The use of TomoSAR techniques allows the identification of multiple scatterers in the same range-azimuth resolution cell [7]. Tomographic processing can be performed by Fourier-based techniques, beamforming, or spectral methods, such as Capon, MUSIC [8], and the more recent CS (compressive sensing) [9][10][11]. In CS-based approaches, TomoSAR is performed as the recovering of a sparse signal by a convex l 1 norm minimization [12] while, in [9,10], the CS approach can improve resolut...