Tomographic SAR imaging with large elevation aperture: a P-band small UAV demonstration

Elevation resolution is an important indicator in tomographic SAR imaging as it represents the ability to discriminate closed targets in elevation. In general, the elevation resolution is proportional to the length of the elevation aperture. However, as the elevation aperture increases, the geometric consistency of the image will undesirably deteriorate and hence fails the image coregistration approach required by the traditional super-resolution tomographic imaging. In this paper, a new super-resolution tomographic imaging method is proposed to overcome the inconsistency problem caused by the large elevation aperture. The core strategy is to get rid of two-dimensional image coregistration by applying a three-dimensional (3D) back projection like imaging manner: the 3D space is firstly divided into a 3D imaging grid, each of which is individually imaged via compressive sensing for super-resolution. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated by both computer simulations and real P-band UAV SAR data.