Spaceborne coherence based SAR tomography

Abstract:
SAR tomography is one of the most prominent techniques that will be implemented in future spaceborne SAR missions. The main challenge to face when employing tomography with repeat-pass spaceborne data is that the temporal decorrelation among acquisitions can be very severe compromising the results. In this context, at a present time, strong effort is dedicated in designing missions exploiting two or more sensors in formation flight performing the surveys in a quasi-simultaneous manner. Out of the resulting temporal-decorrelation-free interferograms, varying the acquisition geometry from pass to pass, one can retrieve the vertical profile via coherence based SAR tomography. The present paper focuses on a two-satellite scenario like TanDEM-X [1], Tandem-L [2], SAOCOM-CS [3]. In particular, TanDEM-X data, acquired in a pursuit monostatic mode, is employed to perform the demonstration over boreal as well as tropical forest.