Multisignal Compressed Sensing for Polarimetric SAR Tomography

Abstract

In recent years, 3-D imaging by means of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors has become a field of intensive research. In SAR tomography, the vertical reflectivity function for every azimuth–range pixel is usually recovered by processing data collected using a defined repeat-pass acquisition geometry. The most common approach is to generate a synthetic aperture in the elevation direction through imaging from a large number of parallel tracks. This imaging technique is appealing, since it is very simple. However, it has the drawback that large temporal baselines can severely affect the reconstruction. In an attempt to reduce the number of parallel tracks, we propose a new approach that exploits structural correlations between neighboring azimuth–range pixels and/or polarimetric channels. As a matter of fact, this can be done under the framework of distributed compressed sensing (CS) (DCS), which stems from CS theory, thus also exploiting sparsity in the tomographic signal. Finally, results demonstrating the potential of the DCS methodology will be validated by using fully polarimetric L-band data acquired by the E-SAR sensor of the German Aerospace Center (DLR).