Generalized-Capon Diff-Tomo for Sensing of Decorrelating Scatterers: Insights, Characterization, and Experiments

In synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing, Differential Tomography (Diff-Tomo) is developing as a powerful crossing of the mature Differential SAR Interferometry and the emerged 3D SAR Tomography, producing advanced 4D (3D+Time) SAR imaging capabilities extensively applied to urban deformation monitoring. More recently, it has been shown that through Diff-Tomo, identifying temporal spectra of multiple height-distributed decorrelating scatterers, the important decorrelation-robust forest Tomography functionality is obtained. To loosen application constraints of the related main experimented full model-based processing, and develop other functionalities, this paper presents an adaptive, just semi-parametric, Diff-Tomo method, first hinted in [1], for joint height profiling of reflectivity and dynamical information of natural distributed (volumetric) scatterers, with its formalization and a series of insights. Beyond decorrelation-robust Tomography, particular reference is to the important functionality of separation of decorrelation mechanisms in forest layers. Simulated characterization analyses and P-band data results are shown.