Innovative development of spaceborne InSAR simulator

A software based interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) simulator is presented in this paper for producing SAR images and InSAR products. The raw data generation is based on pulse to pulse synthesis in the time domain. As inputs, the simulator requires a digital elevation model (DEM), space craft attitude and altitude, orbital information and back scattering model of the terrain surface. A fractal interpolation algorithm has been used to extract the fractal dimension from the natural terrain. The raw data simulation has been combined with the interferogram simulation to validate phase to height conversion and geocoding process. The interferogram simulation has been developed using a method which works with two real radar sensors.