A Time Domain Beamforming Algorithm for SAR Tomography

Interest on 3D imaging in a remote sensing frame has grown in the recent years and it finds in SAR Tomography (TomSAR) a natural way to resolve for targets in the third dimension. In this paper we compare the performance of a pure beamforming technique with the SpecAn algorithm. This comparison has the goal to estabilish if the time domain beamforming (TDB) performance are efficient in order to perform tomographic focusing. A tomographic baseline calibration is also presented. The TDB is applied on simulated and real airborne data in L-band. The real data have been acquired during a tomographic campaign in May 1998 on the test site of Oberpfaffenhofen (Germany) with the E-SAR system of the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

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