Synthetic Aperture Radar Three-Dimensional Imaging——From TomoSAR and Array InSAR to Microwave Vision

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar three-dimensional (SAR 3D) imaging technology can eliminate severe overlap in 2D images, and improve target recognition and 3D modeling capabilities, which have become an important trend in SAR development. After decades of development of SAR 3D imaging technology, many types of 3D imaging methods have been proposed. In this study, the history of SAR 3D imaging technology is systematically reviewed and the characteristics of existing SAR 3D imaging technology are analyzed. Given that the 3D information contained in SAR echo and images is not fully used by existing techniques, a new concept of SAR microwave vision 3D imaging has been proposed for the first time. This new concept is integrated with microwave scattering mechanism and image visual semantics to realize three-dimensional reconstruction, which form the theory and method of SAR microwave vision 3D imaging and can achieve high-efficiency and low-cost SAR 3D imaging. This study also analyzes the concept, goal and key scientific problems of SAR microwave vision 3D imaging and provides a preliminary solution, which will contribute in several ways to our understanding of SAR 3D imaging and provide the basis for further research.