Separation of Scattering Mechanisms Through Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Synthetic Aperture Radar Tomography

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography is gaining increasing interest for its capability to reconstruct the vertical profile of natural and urban scenes. However, since large tomographic apertures will be used in the future in order to increase the vertical resolution of the three-dimensional reconstruction, an analysis of the far-field approximation is necessary to assess its validity in SAR tomography. In addition, it is of great importance to understand how different scattering mechanisms behave based on the selected tomographic SAR acquisition configuration. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) SAR tomography has been proven to be able to detect and separate the contribution of single- and double-bounce scattering, allowing a more precise vertical reconstruction of the scene, and this capability will be assessed in an experiment with a MIMO measurement setup.