Differential tomography: a new framework for SAR interferometry

A new interferometric mode crossing the differential synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry and multibaseline SAR tomography concepts, that can be termed differential SAR tomography, is proposed. Its potentials, coming from the joint elevation-velocity resolution capability of multiple scatterers, are discussed. Processing is cast in a bidimensional baseline-time spectral analysis framework, with sparse sampling. The use of a modern data-dependent bidimensional spectral estimator is proposed for joint baseline-time processing. Simulated results are reported for different baseline-time acquisition patterns and two motion conditions of layover scatterers, showing that this new challenging interferometric technique is promising.