A two-level image pair simulator for interferometric synthetic aperture radar

Abstract

This paper presents a novel simulator to obtain single-look complex (SLC) image pair from the distributed target for interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR). From conventional works, two simulation levels are derived: one is raw signal level (RSL) which means using raw signal to obtain SLC image pairs, the other is SLC image level (SIL) which means obtaining the SLC image pairs directly from existing SAR images. Conventional simulators only work on one simulation level, use complicated backscattering models, have high computational load on RSL and mismatch the real data on SIL. The novel simulator can robustly work on both RSL and SIL. It not only simplified the backscattering model, but also reduces the computational load on RSL. Moreover, the novel simulator creatively uses complex backscattering coefficient (CBC) pair to generate SLC image pair on SIL, which makes the result more accurately match real data. Finally, the improvements of this novel simulator are demonstrated by experimental results.