Polarimetric Sar Tomography with Terrasar-x by Means of Distributed Compressed Sensing

In SAR tomography, the vertical reflectivity function for every azimuth-range pixel is usually recovered by processing data collected using a defined repeat-pass acquisition geometry. A common and appealing approach is to generate a synthetic aperture in the elevation direction through imaging from parallel tracks. However, the quality of conventional reconstruction methods is generally dictated by the Nyquist rate, which can be considerably high. In an attempt to reduce this rate, we propose a new tomographic focusing approach that exploits correlations between neighboring azimuth-range pixels and polarimetric channels. As a matter of fact, this can be done under the framework of Distributed Compressed Sensing (DCS), which stems from Compressed Sensing (CS) theory, thus also exploiting sparsity in the tomographic signal. Results demonstrating the potential of the DCS methodology will be validated, for the first time, using dual-polarized data acquired at X-band by the TerraSAR-X spaceborne system.