High-precision stereoscopic 3-D mapping accuracy

The state-of-the-art in extremely versatile fine-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems allows incredibly fine resolution and accurate images to be formed over a wide range of imaging geometries (squint angles and depression angles). This capability in turn is allowing the fusion of multiple views of targets and scenes into very accurate 3-dimensional renderings of the same scenes and targets. With proper imaging geometry selections, relative height accuracy within a scene can easily be on the order of the resolution of the original SAR images, thereby rivaling the finest IFSARs even on the drawing boards, and without the height ambiguities typically associated with large-baseline IFSARs. Absolute accuracy is typically limited to the accuracy of SAR flight path knowledge, bounded typically by GPS performance. This paper presents the relationship of height accuracy to imaging geometry (flight path) selection, and illustrates conditions for optimum height estimates. Furthermore, height accuracy is related to 3-D position accuracy and precision over a variety of imaging geometries. Performance claims of height precision on the order of resolution are validated with experimental results that are also presented. using multiple aspects of a target scene collected from a high-performance single-phase-center SAR.