Tomographic Sar Imaging of a Forested Area by Time-domain Back-projection

Recently, various attempts have been undertaken to retrieve information about the three-dimensional structure of vegetation from multibaseline synthetic aperture radar data. Although tomographic processing of such data has been demonstrated, yet, there are still several problems that limit the focusing quality. In particular, the frequency-domain based focusing methods are susceptible to irregular and sparse sampling, two problems, which are unavoidable in case of multi-pass, multi-baseline radar data acquired by an airborne system. We propose a time-domain back-projection algorithm, which maintains the original geometric relationship between the original sensor positions and the imaged target and is therefore able to cope with irregular and sparse sampling without introducing any geometric approximations. Preliminary results obtained with a newly acquired P-band tomographic data set consisting of eleven flight tracks are shown and discussed.