3-D SAR Tomography: The Multibaseline Sector Interpolation Approach

Multibaseline (MB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography is a promising mode of SAR interferometry, allowing full 3-D imaging of volumetric and layover scatterers in place of a single elevation estimation capability for each SAR cell . However, Fourier-based MB SAR tomography is generally affected by unsatisfactory imaging quality due to a typically low number of baselines with irregular distribution. In this paper, we improve the basic elevation focusing technique by reconstructing a set of uniform baselines data exploiting in the interpolation step the ancillary information about the extension of a height sector which contains all the scatterers. This a priori information can be derived from the knowledge of the kind of the observed scenario (e.g., forest or urban). To demonstrate the concept, an imaging enhancement analysis is carried out by simulation.