Polarimetric Differential-TomoSAR Imaging

Abstract

Recently, in parallel to the maturation of the operative InSAR techniques based on phase-only data, much interest has grown in techniques based on the coherent combination of SAR images at the complex (amplitude and phase) data level, for the extraction of a more rich information on the observed scene. In particular Tomographic SAR techniques constitute the frontier of this research area. Recently, the Differential Tomography framework has also been introduced and experimented, producing ‘space-time’ signatures of multiple non stationary scatterers superimposed in a SAR cell. To further increase the amount of information which can be extracted, in this work we extend the Differential Tomography framework in a polarimetric sense, allowing the extraction of joint information about the heights, the deformation velocities and the scattering mechanisms characterizing the imaged scatterers. First real data samples are presented of the new Polarimetric Differential Tomography concept.