3D reconstruction from very small TanDEM-X stacks

Abstract

Multibaseline synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometric techniques, such as SAR tomography, is well established for 3D reconstruction in urban area. These methods usually require a fairly large interferometric stacks (>20 images) for a reliable reconstruction. They are not directly applicable to SAR interferometric (InSAR) stack with only few acquisitions, as the extreme small number of acquisitions can severely bias the estimates from the spectral estimators, such as periodogram which is often only asymptotically optimal. In additional, the number of images also causes sever ambiguity issue of pixel with low signal-to-noise ratio. This paper demonstrates a new processing framework of 3D reconstruction using extremely small stacks.