Polarimetric 3-D Reconstruction From Multicircular SAR at P-Band

Multicircular synthetic aperture radar (SAR) (MCSAR) is an extension of circular SAR (CSAR) characterized by the formation of a synthetic aperture in elevation with several circular flights. This imaging mode allows an improved resolution in the plane perpendicular to the line of sight ( LOS⊥), thus suppressing the 3-D cone-shaped sidelobes that are formed when focusing with CSAR. This letter presents the first polarimetric MCSAR airborne experiment acquired at P-band by the German Aerospace Center (DLR)´s F-SAR system over a forested area in Vordemwald, Switzerland. This letter also includes a phase calibration method based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) using ground signatures to estimate constant phase offsets within a stack of 2-D images. Focusing methods, such as fast-factorized back projection (FFBP), beamforming (BF), and compressive sensing (CS), described in previous publications are used to solve the complex reflectivity in the (x, y, z) space.