Temporal Decorrelation Effects in Super-resolution 3d Tomosar

Much interest is continuing to grow in advanced interferometric SAR methods for full 3D imaging, in particular of volumetric forest scatterers. Multibaseline SAR tomographic elevation beam forming, i.e. spatial spectral estimation, is a promising technique in this framework. In this paper, the important effect of temporal decorrelation during the repeat pass multibaseline acquisition is analyzed with focus on superresolution tomography with limited sparse data, considering in particular model based and adaptive beamforming methods. The comparison among the two methods has been carried out for varying decorrelation condition and acquisition configurations. Critical coherence conditions for SAR tomography are also discussed, showing for the first time that adaptive tomography can be more robust to temporal decorrelation than model based tomography. Finally, directions in the more general new framework of “differential tomography” are hinted.