Interferometric and Tomographic SAR

Abstract

Undoubtedly, one of the more interesting applications of synthetic aperture radar imagery to emerge in the past two decades has been topographic mapping using interferometry. Because the phase angle of the backscattered signal for a given pixel is available, and phase is easily measured, it is possible to compare the phase differences of two different images of the same region and, from that comparison, find the relative locations of pixels in three dimensions: latitude, longitude and altitude, or their equivalents. In this chapter we show how that can be done, and how interferometry can also be used for change detection. The fundamental concept is extended to show how a tomographic process can be implemented, in which the vertical detail within a ground resolution cell can be resolved. The radar geometry used for interferometric applications is a special case of bistatic radar considered in Chapt. 7.

An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02020-9_10