An Approach for Spaceborne InSAR DEM Inversion Integrated with Stereo-SAR Method

Abstract

Spaceborne Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) has the capability of high precise topographic mapping for large area. However, on the one hand, digital elevation models (DEM) inversion needs at least one ground control points (GCP) to obtain absolute interferometric phase as the unwrapped phase is just a relative value. On the other hand, the baseline value used for DEM inversion also needs to be calibrated using GCPs due to the measure error. In practice, it is difficult to manually deploy GCPs especially in the area of steep topography. At present, with the improvement of orbital measure accuracy and system time accuracy for spaceborne SAR satellite, high precise absolute 3D location information of some stable point scatterers can be obtained by stereo SAR using data from different viewing angles. Therefore, this paper combines stereo SAR with InSAR. These point scatters are used as GCPs to calibrate baseline and estimate absolute phase. As a result, high accurate DEM generation without GCPs can be achieved. The experiment using TerraSAR-X data verifies the effectiveness of this method.