Cancellation of singularities in SAR for curved flight paths and non-flat topography

Abstract

We consider a mathematical model of synthetic aperture radar with a known, possibly non-flat, topography. In this context we consider the problem of recovering the wavefront set of the ground reflectivity, given radar data measured along a curved flight path. We show that if singularities are located at ‘mirror points,’ then the resulting data may be smooth; in effect, the singularities ‘cancel.’ With a flat topography, these mirror points are always discrete, but we show that in a non-flat topography there may be infinite families of mirror points.