Ground Based SAR for environmental risk monitoring

Ground-Based SAR (GB-SAR) sensors are showing to be very useful in the topographic mapping. In this context, the phase unwrapping step plays a key role in the height recover. In the recent years, multi-channel Interferometric SAR (InSAR) techniques have proved to be effective in solving the phase unwrapping problem. Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) based approaches exploit statistical characterization in order to correctly combine the multi-channel acquisitions and to provide the three dimensional reconstructions of the observed scene. In this paper the application of the two estimation methods on a multi-channel GB-SAR configuration for the reconstruction of the topographic profile is analyzed. The potentialities of the techniques have been assessed by using a real data set.