SAR Tomography Imaging for Buildings Using an Inconsistency Criterion for Amplitude and Phase

Abstract

An indispensable step in the imaging of Tomographic Synthetic Aperture Radar (TomoSAR) in spectral analysis or Compressive Sensing (CS) technology is estimating the perpendicular baselines in the Perpendicular Line Of Sight (PLOS) in deramping operations. To avoid this procedure, we introduce a Beam Forming (BF) method in the spatial domain that scans for TomoSAR focusing in the PLOS direction. Because of the sophisticated structure of buildings in urban areas, multipass high-resolution SAR images suffer from discrepancies in the look and incidence angles as well as speckle noise. As a result, it is challenging to precisely coregister all the homologous points in the identical pixels of multipass SAR images. To identify the most relevant pixels with respect to both amplitude and phase when BF imaging is implemented, we propose an inconsistency criterion for specific pixels using the joint phase and amplitude of pixels in a window. By minimizing the inconsistency criterion, homologous points with high accuracy can be identified by focusing on TomoSAR imaging. We used simulation and real data from a multipass X-band airborne TomoSAR system in China to test the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the peak of the reflectivity profile via conventional tomographic imaging is about 15.63 m, whereas that by the proposed method is 16.88 m, which is very close to the actual height of the 18 m building. The results demonstrate the feasibility of improving the focusing power of scatterers in the PLOS direction and extracting the threedimensional outliers of buildings.

Keywords

• tomographic synthetic aperture radar (tomosar)
• tomographic imaging
• joint phase and amplitude
• inconsistence criterion