Single-pass interferometric synthetic aperture radar

摘要

A new process for interferometric height estimation using orbital synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is disclosed. The process uses coherent SAR data collected on a single pass and may be collected by a single-antenna radar mounted on an orbiting satellite. The data is used to construct two overlapping synthetic apertures. The along-orbit separation of the synthetic aperture centers combines with orbital curvature to form a suitable interferometric baseline. The overlap provides adequate correlation to support image registration and phase-difference estimation. Single-pass collection eliminates temporal decorrelation between the interferometric image pair. It also eliminates the differential satellite ephemeris errors which plague two-pass and two-vehicle schemes. Both phase unwrapping and the need for elevation tie points are eliminated by pre-compensating the interferometric data with height estimates from a SAR-stereo pair formed from the same collected data.