Digital Elevation Model Reconstruction in Multichannel Spaceborne/Stationary SAR Interferometry

In this letter, we propose an approach for multichannel spaceborne/stationary synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry based on maximum a posteriori (MAP). Spaceborne/stationary SAR is a typical bistatic SAR configuration. In order to solve the phase disconnection problem while working with a low signal-to-noise ratio and a limited number of baselines as well as having large look angle variations, we use the height estimation results derived from iterative multibaseline unwrapping as the initial heights for the MAP estimation. The method presented here is highly experimental. An experiment is carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In this experiment, TerraSAR-X, working in the high-resolution spotlight mode with a 300-MHz bandwidth, acts as the transmitter. The receivers with three echo channels are placed on the ground to receive the reflected waveform. As proof of concept, we demonstrate the height estimation of several buildings.