An Efficient Tomographic Inversion Approach for Urban Mapping using Meter Resolution SAR Image Stacks

Kurzfassung

This article describes an efficient approach for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography inversion. The proposed approach is an integration of the available SAR tomography (TomoSAR) algorithms (e.g. SVD-Wiener, SL1MMER) and the well-known persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI). It consists in general three steps: first, a global estimation of the topography and motion parameters using PSI; second, a single and double scatterer discrimination step based on the results of the first step; and lastly, a SAR tomography inversion, performed on the pre-classified double scatterers, retrieving the topography and motion parameters of both scatterers. The proposed approach is tested on a number of TerraSAR-X image stacks of urban areas. It provides reliable results comparable to that processed using the most expensive TomoSAR algorithms (e.g. SL1MMER) only, and saves computational time by over fifty times.