Comparison of interferometric products of recent high resolution X-band SAR missions and platforms

In the last decade data from high resolution spaceborne X-band systems and airborne InSAR have been made available to the remote sensing community for a wide range of applications. To demonstrate the value of using radar imagery and DEMs from spaceborne systems such as TerraSAR-X, COSMO-SkyMed and SRTM-X, the ortho-rectified radar images and DEMs from Napa Valley, USA, the Bolzano region of the Italian Alps and the Gap region of the French Alps are compared to airborne X-band images and DEMs from the STAR platform of Intermap Technologies. The visual appearance and horizontal accuracy of the radar imagery are compared and examined. The height accuracy and the spatial content of the DEMs from space-borne SAR are also investigated in this paper.