Spaceborne coherence based SAR tomography

Abstract

SAR tomography is one of the most prominent techniques that will be implemented in future spaceborne SAR missions. The main challenge to face when employing tomography with repeat-pass spaceborne data is that the temporal decorrelation among acquisitions can be very severe compromising the results. In this context, at a present time, strong effort is dedicated in designing missions exploiting two or more sensors in formation flight performing the surveys in a quasi-simultaneous manner. Out of the resulting temporal-decorrelation-free interferograms, varying the acquisition geometry from pass to pass, one can retrieve the vertical profile via coherence based SAR tomography. The present paper focuses on a two-satellite scenario like TanDEM-X, Tandem-L, SAOCOM-CS. In particular, TanDEM-X data, acquired in a pursuit monostatic mode, is employed to perform the demonstration over boreal as well as tropical forest.