PROJECT TITLE :

Geodetic SAR Tomography

ABSTRACT:

In this paper, we have a tendency to propose a framework called “geodetic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography” that fuses the SAR imaging geodesy and tomographic SAR inversion (TomoSAR) approaches to get absolute three-D positions of a big amount of natural scatterers. The methodology is applied on four terribly high resolution TerraSAR-X spotlight image stacks acquired over the town of Berlin. Since all the TomoSAR estimates are relative to the same reference point object whose absolute 3-D positions are retrieved by means that of stereo SAR, the purpose clouds reconstructed using information acquired from totally different viewing angles will be geodetically fused. To assess the accuracy of the position estimates, the ensuing absolute shadow-free three-D TomoSAR purpose clouds are compared with a digital surface model obtained by airborne LiDAR. It is demonstrated that an absolute positioning accuracy of around twenty cm and a meter-order relative positioning accuracy can be achieved by the proposed framework using TerraSAR-X knowledge.