3D Tomographic and Differential Tomographic Response to Partially Coherent Scenes

Much interest is continuing to grow in advanced SAR methods for full 3D imaging of volumetric scatterers, in particular forests. Multibaseline SAR tomographic elevation beam forming is a promising technique in this framework. In this paper, the effect of temporal decorrelation during the repeat pass multibaseline acquisition on the advanced adaptive elevation beam forming tomography is analyzed, using a simple temporal decorrelation model. Also, the response of the recently introduced differential tomography technique, producing "space-time" signatures of scattering phenomena in the SAR cell, is investigated in the same conditions. Finally, first analyses of tomography robust to some temporal decorrelation phenomena through differential tomographic processing are carried out for simulated temporal decorrelating volumetric scatterers. Preliminary differential tomography results with real L-band forest data are also presented.