First 3-D Reconstructions of Targets Hidden Beneath Foliage by Means of Polarimetric SAR Tomography

SAR tomography (SARTom) is an imaging technique that allows multiple phase center separation in the vertical direction, leading to a 3-D reconstruction of the imaged scene. The retrieval of volume structure information (e.g., for forest classification) and the solution of the layover problem are two of the most promising applications. In this letter, SARTom, in combination with polarimetry (PolSARTom), is exploited to image and to extract characteristic features (e.g., shape and height) of targets hidden beneath foliage. This analysis is applied to L-band airborne data acquired by the E-SAR system of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) during a tomographic campaign that took place in September 2006 on the test site of Dornstetten (Germany).

[1]  Alberto Moreira,et al.  Extended chirp scaling algorithm for air- and spaceborne SAR data processing in stripmap and ScanSAR imaging modes , 1996, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[2]  Alberto Moreira,et al.  Estimation of the Minimum Number of Tracks for SAR Tomography , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[3]  E. Pottier,et al.  Polarimetric Radar Imaging: From Basics to Applications , 2009 .

[4]  Andreas Reigber,et al.  Polarimetric SAR Tomography , 2005 .

[5]  R. O. Schmidt,et al.  Multiple emitter location and signal Parameter estimation , 1986 .

[6]  J. Capon.  High-resolution frequency-wavenumber spectrum analysis , 1969 .

[7]  Felix Morsdorf,et al.  Tomographic Imaging of a Forested Area By Airborne Multi-Baseline P-Band SAR , 2008, Sensors.

[8]  Matteo Nannini,et al.  A Time Domain Beamforming Algorithm for SAR Tomography , .

[9]  Kostas Papathanassiou,et al.  First demonstration of airborne SAR tomography using multibaseline L-band data , 1999, IEEE 1999 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium. IGARSS'99 (Cat. No.99CH36293).

[10]  Gianfranco Fornaro,et al.  Linear and adaptive spaceborne three-dimensional SAR tomography: a comparison on real data , 2009 .

[11]  A. Reigber,et al.  Adaptive spectral estimation for multibaseline SAR tomography with airborne L-band data , 2003, IGARSS 2003. 2003 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium. Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37477).

[12]  D G Corr,et al.  Target detection beneath foliage using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar interferometry , 2004 .

[13]  Matteo Nannini,et al.  Height dependent motion compensation and coregistration for airborne SAR tomography , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[14]  Francesco Soldovieri,et al.  Three-dimensional focusing with multipass SAR data , 2003, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[15]  Joachim H. G. Ender,et al.  Experiments of interferometric layover solution with the three-antenna airborne AER-II SAR system , 2004, IGARSS 2004. 2004 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[16]  Jordi J. Mallorquí,et al.  Comparison of Topography- and Aperture-Dependent Motion Compensation Algorithms for Airborne SAR , 2007, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

[17]  Stefano Tebaldini,et al.  Single and Multipolarimetric SAR Tomography of Forested Areas: A Parametric Approach , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.