Operational TomoSAR processing using TerraSAR-X high resolution spotlight stacks from multiple view angles

With the availability of meter resolution space-borne SAR systems, urban monitoring using SAR Tomography (TomoSAR) becomes increasingly popular, because of its layover separation capability. However, compared to Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI), TomoSAR applications are much more computationally expensive. This article introduces a TomoSAR processing system for long-term large urban area mapping and monitoring. Two new features were introduced: 1. PSI was integrated into the currently available TomoSAR algorithms (e.g. TSVD, SVD-Wiener, and SL1MMER) to increase the overall computational efficiency; 2. results from multiple view angles were fused to provide full coverage of each building façade. This processing system handles an entire TerraSAR-X high resolution spotlight scene in an affordable time, achieving scatterer density up to 1 million scatterer/km2 from a single stack, comparing to 60 thousand to 100 thousand scatterer/km2 for PSI.

[1]  Gianfranco Fornaro,et al.  Four-Dimensional SAR Imaging for Height Estimation and Monitoring of Single and Double Scatterers , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[2]  Fabio Rocca,et al.  Permanent scatterers in SAR interferometry , 1999, Remote Sensing.

[3]  Richard Bamler,et al.  Let's Do the Time Warp: Multicomponent Nonlinear Motion Estimation in Differential SAR Tomography , 2011, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

[4]  Fabrizio Lombardini,et al.  Differential tomography: a new framework for SAR interferometry , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[5]  Richard Bamler,et al.  Very High Resolution Spaceborne SAR Tomography in Urban Environment , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[6]  Michael Eineder,et al.  Geometrical Fusion of Multitrack PS Point Clouds , 2012, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

[7]  Gianfranco Fornaro,et al.  Three-dimensional multipass SAR focusing: experiments with long-term spaceborne data , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[8]  Xiao Xiang Zhu,et al.  Integration of tomographic SAR inversion and PSI for operational use , 2012 .

[9]  Richard Bamler,et al.  Tomographic SAR Inversion by $L_{1}$ -Norm Regularization—The Compressive Sensing Approach , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.