Photogrammetric techniques for interferometric synthetic aperture radar data exploitation

Recent advances in the areas of phase history processing, interferometry, and radargrammetric adjustment have made possible extremely accurate data extraction from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery data, The potential gain from interferometric exploitation is significant since accuracy of measurements can theoretically be determined to within a resolution element of wavelength dimension. Recent work by the authors has shown that the main barrier to accurate and efficient elevation extraction is the measurement jitter caused by terrain variations, which overlay differently in the two SAR images. A unique combination of advanced photogrammetric and signal processing techniques is described which mal;es possible more accurate er;traction of metric position and elevation model data from multiple pass SAR. This paper addresses the accuracy achievable from repeat passes of the ERS-1 and SIR-C spaceborne platforms and is also applicable to airborne SAR platforms.