Error analysis of DEM derived from airborne single-pass interferometric SAR data

The main objective of this paper is to examine and evaluate the performance of the airborne SAR system through interferometric processing and error analysis. Firstly, the paper describes how high-precision DEMs are derived from the airborne dual-antenna InSAR data. Based on airborne dual-antenna InSAR bore-sight model, this paper summarizes the main factors which influence the accuracy of DEM in data processing, and analyses the error of those factors. Then, the POS/AV510 system parameters are used for analyzing the quantitative relationship between the platform height, baseline length, baseline angle, look angle and DEM error. The experimental data used is airborne dual-antenna X-band InSAR data, and the measured GCPs are used to validate the accuracy of DEM. Evaluation results in terms of the standard deviation (SD) and the average mean error (AME) are derived by comparing the reconstructed InSAR DEM with the reference GCPs. The AME of the DEM is up to 1.7628 m. The SD of the DEM are up to ±1.0858 m.