Impact of Wind-Induced Scatterers Motion on GB-SAR Imaging

Abstract

Ground-based synthetic aperture radar (GB-SAR) sensors represent a cost-effective solution for change detection and ground displacement assessment of small-scale areas in real-time early warning applications. GB-SAR systems based on stepped linear frequency modulated continuous wave signals have led to several improvements such as a significant reduction of the acquisition time. Nevertheless, the acquisition time is still long enough to force a degradation of the quality of the reconstructed images because of possible short-term variable reflectivity of the scenario. This reduction of the quality may degrade the differential interferometric detection process. In scenarios where interesting targets are surrounded by vegetation, this is normally related to atmospheric conditions, in particular, the wind. The present paper characterizes the effect of the short-term variable reflectivity in the GB-SAR image reconstruction and evaluates its equivalent blurring effect, the decorrelation introduced in the SAR images, and the degradation of the extracted parameters. In order to validate the results, the study assesses different GB-SAR images obtained with the RISKSAR-X sensor, which has been developed by the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya.