Applications of SAR Tomography on Persistent Scatterers detection, based on Beam-Forming filtering

Abstract

The main advantage of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Tomography over classical interferometry consists in capacity to detect the presence of multiple scatterers within the same resolution cell. In this paper we present an algorithm for detection of Persistent Scatterers (PS) based on the variation of reflectivity function in elevation direction reconstructed with Beam-Forming technique. Then, we extract the contribution of dominant scatterers from each resolution cell and reapply the detection algorithm to identify the presence of secondary PSs in scene's pixels. The methods were implemented on a dataset of high-resolution Single Look Complex (SLC) images acquired by TerraSAR-X sensor, on which the residual component of interferometric phase was estimated and compensated locally.