Essential Site Maintenance: Authorea-powered sites will be updated circa 15:00-17:00 Eastern on Tuesday 5 November.
There should be no interruption to normal services, but please contact us at [email protected] in case you face any issues.

loading page

Multi-depth multi-focusing SAR algorithm
  • +1
  • Ettore Biondi,
  • Sang-Ho Yun,
  • Howard Zebker,
  • Roger Michaelides
Ettore Biondi
Stanford University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

Author Profile
Sang-Ho Yun
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Author Profile
Howard Zebker
Stanford Univ
Author Profile
Roger Michaelides
Stanford University
Author Profile

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) multi-temporal techniques have been proposed to improve image resolution, persistent-scatterer detection, and damage-map generation (Bujor et al., 2004; Hooper, 2008; Yun et al., 2012). The usage of multiple scenes diminishes the speckle noise commonly present in a SAR image and increases the overall signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of dominant radar scatterers. Following the same idea, we propose a new SAR processing workflow based on the back-projection algorithm (Cafforio et al., 1991). We employ the back-projection method’s flexibility to focus the radar pulses at multiple depths shifted with respect to the reference digital elevation model (DEM), yielding a volume of SLCs discretely sampled over a range of elevations/depths. These scenes are then combined to produce a single-look complex (SLC) image, which presents increased SNR and effective resolution. Similar image improvements can be achieved by spatially averaging a SLC image generated at high spatial sampling. However, the proposed method requires a fraction of the processing time of the fine-spatial SLC formation. The proposed approach retains the same benefits of any back-projection algorithm and enables the formation of SLC images corresponding to large Earth surface extents.