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With the development of airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) measurement techniques, 3D SAR image formation has become prevalent in the SAR community. Conventional backprojection algorithms have difficulty mapping scatters to a voxel grid in 3D space due to a myriad of differential ranges in the height dimension. The inaccurate mapping of range profiles is commonly seen in layover defects. To address this issue while using limited sensor aspects, this study utilizes tomographic techniques. Interferometric SAR is leveraged to yield height estimate surfaces and applied to the 3D backprojection images as a spatial filter. Fusion across a swath of aspects in azimuth for a fixed elevation bin are utilized to resolve shadowed and non-resolved features in the surface reconstructions. Height estimations are applied to the 3D image grid corresponding to the range and cross-range voxels. Multiple height estimate algorithms are studied and yield results on a feature level basis of targets accurate within inches for X-Band synthetically generated data.
Shaver et al. (Fri,) studied this question.