Gianfranco Fornaro, Fabrizio Lombardini
Due to the capability to provide direct physical measurements, interferometry is the technique that has most pushed the applications of SAR to a wide range of scientific areas and can provide returns for our life in terms of security. Repeat pass differential interferometry and its evolution to persistent scatterers interferometry, which allows accurate localization and monitoring of ground targets to a mm/yr order accuracy, has been the breakthrough for the application of SAR in the risk monitoring.
Multipass/multiview SAR data are today available for most of the Earth by means of acquisitions of existing sensors carried out over repeated orbits. Such amount of data calls for the development of new processing techniques that improves the existing technology in terms of accuracy and objectiveness of the measurements: multidimensional imaging, i.e., 3D and 4D (space-velocity) imaging, is an example in this direction.
The tutorial concentrates on 3D imaging, also known as SAR tomography or 3D SAR focusing, and explains these advanced SAR techniques as in a framework of extension of classical model-based multi-baseline interferometry. The capability of 3D SAR Tomography to generate 3D images and hence to profile the vertical scattering distribution also for semitransparent media as well as the possibility to distinguish and locate different scatterers interfering in the same pixel, is shown on real data. Interference between the response of ground scatterers appear to be a major problem in images acquired over urban areas by the latest high resolution X-Band SAR sensors (e.g. TerraSAR-X and Cosmo/Skymed).
Beside multibaseline Tomography for layover scatterers separation and three-dimensional imaging of volumetric scatterers, the new technique of multipass differential-tomographic, i.e. four-dimensional imaging of multiple scatterers with deformation motions, crossing differential interferometry with multibaseline tomography is also addressed. We show technical aspects and results of experiments with real data to understand the capability of this technique to extract deformation time series of scatterers interfering in the same radar pixel.
Further discussions about the potentialities of multidimensional imaging with the next generation bistatic and multistatic SAR systems, which will allow acquiring multiview data simultaneously and repeatedly, are also addressed.
Gianfranco Fornaro graduated, cum laude, in Electronic Engineering at the University of Napoli in 1992 and received the Ph.D. degree in Telecommunications in 1997. Since 1993 he has been with the “Istituto per il Rilevamento Elettromagnetico dell’Ambiente (IREA)” of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) where he currently holds the position of Senior Researcher. He has been Adjunct Professor of Communications at the Universities of Cassino and Naples “Federico II” and of Signal Theory at the University of Reggio Calabria. Dr Fornaro has been visiting scientist at the German Aerospace Establishment (DLR), also for within the Italy-Germany cooperation during the SIR-C/X-SAR mission and at Politecnico of Milano. He has been also invited lecturer at the Istituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica (ITA) in Sao José dos Campos (Brazil) and RESTEC (Tokyo).
He has been chairman in several conferences sessions dedicated to SAR processing and SAR interferometry and in 2005 served as editor of the “Advances in Interferometric SAR processing” special issue of the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing (JASP). He was also awarded in 1997 of the Mountbatten Premium by the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE). Gianfranco Fornaro has published about 50 papers iin international peer-review journals in the SAR field.
His main research interests regard the signal processing filed with applications to airborne and spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data processing, including Motion Compensation, SAR Interferometry, Differential SAR Interferometry and 3D and 4D SAR imaging.
Fabrizio Lombardini received the Italian Laurea degree, with honors, in electronic engineering and the PhD degree in telecommunication engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1993 and 1997, respectively. He was then granted by the EU a Marie Curie Fellowship of the Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) Program, which he spent as Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering of University College London, U.K., from 1998 to 1999. Then, he joined the Department of "Ingegneria dell'Informazione" of University of Pisa, where he currently holds the position of Assistant Professor. He is IEEE Member since 1993 and Senior Member since January 2003. He has given lectures at universities and institutions in Italy and abroad, has chaired 8 special sessions on SAR multibaseline/multichannel interferometry/three-dimensional techniques at international conferences, and has been guest co-editor of the EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing special issue on Advances in Interferometric SAR Processing. He is co-author of a tutorial entitled Multibaseline Post-processing for SAR Interferometry presented at the IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Workshop in July 2004, and has been lecturer of a tutorial entitled Multidimensional SAR Imaging at the 7th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar in June 2008. His general interests are in the areas of statistical signal processing, estimation and detection theory, adaptive and super-resolution spectral analysis, array processing, and performance bounds evaluation, with application to radar systems. In particular, his research interests include multibaseline and multifrequency interferometric SAR algorithms and systems, both cross- and along-track, three-dimensional SAR tomography, differential SAR interferometry, multisensor data fusion, and radar detection in non-Gaussian clutter.
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