A Time Domain Along-Track SAR Interferometry Method

Abstract:

Differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) has already been proven to be a useful technique for measuring ground displacement at millimeter level. One major drawback of traditional DInSAR technique is that only 1-D deformation in slant range direction can be detected. In order to obtain along-track displacement using a single InSAR pair, two major attempts have been made. The first one is based on cross-correlation between two SAR amplitude images. The second attempt is based on split-beam processing to generate two SAR images from forward- and backward-looking beams. Comparing with the former method, this multiple-aperture SAR interferometry (MAI) can achieve much better measurement accuracy. The major drawback of the MAI method is degraded signal to noise ratio (SNR) and along-track resolution since total along-track integration time decreases in the split-beam procedure.

In order to improve the SNR and along-track resolution as well as to extract the terrain displacement in the along-track direction, a time domain along-track SAR interferometry method is proposed in this study. Using traditional time domain backprojection method, the phase component corresponding to slant range direction offset can be estimated and removed from the range compressed SAR signal. Then a phase estimation procedure is implemented to obtain the phase component in the along-track direction. Using ALOS PALSAR data over Kilauea Volcano area in Hawai’i, our experimental results demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed method in extracting 2-D terrain deformation map from one pair of SAR images.