SAR Tomography for Target/Feature Detection in Foliated Regions

Tomographic SAR is a data collection and processing technology that produces true 3-D volumetric imagery. This approach offers significant benefits for enhanced imagery through clutter rejection, enhanced target definition, and better resolution. Tomographic SAR has been demonstrated at UHF frequencies where it has shown benefits in concealed target detection, improved feature extraction and characterization, bare earth mapping under foliage, and foliage characterization. Essex has developed and integrated these capabilities into a platform-independent processing suite with a Java GUI running on Linux, Irix, and Windows. In addition, tomographic SAR has been successfully applied to a wide variety of synthetic aperture scenarios, and the theory permits fusion of data from multiple passes, multiple receiver antennas, or multiple platforms. The Phase II effort will focus on augmenting the tomographic algorithms resident at Essex with polarimetric classification techniques to enable expanded and enhanced feature extraction, terrain characterization, and target visualization. Extending these techniques to existing sensor systems provides many new opportunities for exploitation of mature, deployed SAR systems. One obvious benefit is the creation of true 3-D scenes with no layover.