Speckle Tracking and Interferometric Processing of TerraSAR-X TOPS Data for Mapping Nonstationary Scenarios

Abstract

Terrain observation by progressive scan (TOPS) antenna beam steering is utilized for European Space Agency's (ESA's) Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor for the interferometric wide swath (IW) and extra wide swath (EW) modes. As a consequence of the azimuth steering, the resulting signal characteristics have to be accounted for in SAR interferometric (InSAR) processing. This paper assesses the performance of speckle tracking and spectral diversity (SD) [also referred to as split spectrum or multi-aperture interferometry (MAI)] when applied to TOPS data acquired over nonstationary scenarios, such as glaciers. The characteristics of the TOPS signal, especially the azimuth-variant Doppler centroid, are discussed with particular consideration of along-track surface motion between the interferometric acquisitions. The TOPS specific coregistration requirements are formulated, followed by an analysis of the theoretical estimation accuracy as a function of the estimation window size. A refined adaptive coregistration approach based on SD is suggested. Experimental TerraSAR-X TOPS data acquired over the Lambert glacier, Antarctica, are used to validate the proposed speckle tracking and SD methodologies.