SAR tomography as an add-on to PSI for improved deformation sampling in urban areas: A quality assessment

Persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI) typically rejects layovers. Therefore, layover-affected urban areas may suffer from inadequate deformation sampling. SAR tomography, when used as an add-on to PSI, reveals additional deformation samples by resolving layovers. In this paper we quantify the relative gain in deformation sampling, while taking into account the quality of the additional (double) scatterers in terms of root-mean-square (RMS) phase deviation. We experiment on an interferometric stack of 50 TerraSAR-X stripmap images acquired over the city of Barcelona. The results show a tradeoff between the gain and the quality of the detected scatterers. For the observed urban area, we obtain a gain of 9.8% while the RMS phase deviation for 99% of the detected double scatterers is less than 1.1 radians.