Similarity criterion for SAR tomography over dense urban area

Abstract

Starting from a stack of co-registered SAR images in interferometric configuration, SAR tomography performs a reconstruction of the reflectivity of scatterers in 3-D. Several scatterers observed within the same resolution cell of each SAR image can be separated by jointly unmixing the SAR complex amplitude observed throughout the stack. To achieve a reliable tomographic reconstruction, it is necessary to estimate locally the SAR covariance matrix by performing some spatial averaging. This necessary averaging step introduces some resolution loss and can bias the tomographic reconstruction by mistakenly including the response of scatterers located within the averaging area but outside the resolution cell of interest. This paper addresses the problem of identifying pixels corresponding to similar tomographic content, i.e., pixels that can be safely averaged prior to tomographic reconstruction. We derive a similarity criterion adapted to SAR tomography and compare its performance with existing criteria on a stack of Spotlight TerraSAR-X images.