Imaging of targets beneath foliage with SAR tomography

SAR tomography (SARTom) is an imaging technique that allows multiple phase centre separation in the vertical (height) direction, leading to a 3-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of the imaged scene. It is usually performed after standard 2D SAR repeat-pass processing and operates on a stack of coregistered SAR images. Retrieval of volume structure information (e.g. for forest classification) and the solution of the layover problem are two of the most promising applications. In this paper the application of SARTom to image targets hidden beneath foliage is presented. This method is applied to L-band airborne data acquired during a tomographic campaign that took place in September 2006 on the test site of Dornstetten (Germany) involving the E-SAR system of the German Aerospace Center (DLR).