A Robust Multibaseline Sector Interpolator for 3D SAR Imaging

Abstract:
Multibaseline (MB) SAR tomography is a promising advanced mode of SAR interferometry, allowing full 3D imaging of volumetric and layover scatterers. However, Fourier-based MB SAR tomography is generally affected by unsatisfactory imaging quality due to a typically low number of baselines with irregular spatial distribution. Recently, to improve the elevation focusing technique, a sector interpolation approach has been proposed by the authors. A set of uniform baseline data is recovered from the actual non-uniform one by exploiting the a priori information about the extension of a height sector which contains the scatterers. In this work, the basic sector interpolator is extended to handle data corrupted by residual calibration or atmospheric compensation errors, which affect the MB data set in the practical applications. The effectiveness of the proposed robust sector interpolation technique is investigated by means of numerical and simulated analyses.