630 IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 5, NO.

4, OCTOBER 2008

3-D SAR Tomography: The Multibaseline Sector

Interpolation Approach
Fabrizio Lombardini, Senior Member, IEEE, and Matteo Pardini, Student Member, IEEE

Abstract—Multibaseline (MB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR)

tomography is a promising mode of SAR interferometry, allowing
full 3-D imaging of volumetric and layover scatterers in place
of a single elevation estimation capability for each SAR cell [1].
However, Fourier-based MB SAR tomography is generally af-
fected by unsatisfactory imaging quality due to a typically low
number of baselines with irregular distribution. In this letter, we
improve the basic elevation focusing technique by reconstructing
a set of uniform baselines data exploiting in the interpolation step
the ancillary information about the extension of a height sector
which contains all the scatterers. This a priori information can be
derived from the knowledge of the kind of the observed scenario
(e.g., forest or urban). To demonstrate the concept, an imaging
enhancement analysis is carried out by simulation.
Index Terms—Electromagnetic tomography, interpolation, sig-
nal sampling, spectral analysis, synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
interferometry, 3-D imaging.
Fig. 1. Geometry of the MB tomographic acquisition. B: overall orthogonal
I. I NTRODUCTION baseline. θ: elevation angle. Z: vertical height. K: number of tracks. R: slant
range. δR: slant range resolution. Distances and angles not in scale.

S YNTHETIC aperture radar (SAR) 2-D imaging is a ma-

ture technique with unique capabilities in Earth observa-
tion, e.g., for vegetation and snow mapping, forestry, land-use
monitoring, agriculture, soil-moisture determination, mineral
exploration, and urban mapping. However, since the 3-D scene
scattering properties are projected onto the 2-D azimuth-range
plane, possible ambiguities can arise in the inversion of phys-
ical and geometrical parameters, causing several drawbacks
depending on the application. For instance, in forest remote
sensing with current available SAR systems, in areas of dense
vegetation, efforts to correlate backscattered energy with bio-
mass tend to saturate [1], [2]. The 3-D SAR Tomography tech-
nique (Tomo-SAR) is a very promising advance in this field.
Tomo-SAR is a multibaseline (MB) extension of conventional
cross-track SAR interferometry, employing many (on the order
of ten) passes over the same area. While conventional single
baseline interferometric SAR can only furnish a measure of the
terrain topography [3], thus being often called a “2.5D” tech-
nique, Tomo-SAR offers resolution in the third dimension and
imaging capabilities. In other words, Tomo-SAR can separate
multiple scatterers at different heights in each given range-
Manuscript received August 16, 2007; revised December 14, 2007. Current
version published October 22, 2008. Part of this work was presented at the
Waveform Diversity and Design Conf. 2007.
The authors are with the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione,
University of Pisa, 56122 Pisa, Italy (e-mail: f.lombardini@iet.unipi.it; matteo.
pardini@iet.unipi.it).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LGRS.2008.2001283
1545-598X/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
azimuth cell, and produces a continuous profiling along the
(normal-to-slant range) height direction (h-direction). In fact,
the Tomo-SAR technique exploits an aperture synthesis also
along the vertical plane, i.e., the height-ground range plane
(see Fig. 1), to get full 3-D imaging through elevation beam-
forming [1], [4]. As a consequence, given its capabilities of
imaging the distribution of the scatterers along the h-direction,
Tomo-SAR can add more features, e.g., for biomass estimation,
forest classification, tree and building height estimation, and
other geophysical parameter extraction problems; interest is
growing also for ice thickness monitoring. In particular, for
forest parameter retrieval, it constitutes a nonmodel-based al-
ternative to the model-based inversion of [5] and polarimetric
interferometry (see the references in [6]).
The Tomo-SAR concept was successfully demonstrated by
means of experiments with anechoic chamber [4] and live
recorded airborne L-band data [1]. Other experiments have
been carried out with the conventional Fourier-based tomo-
graphic processor exploiting repeat-pass satellites acquisition
over a scene containing a corner reflector [7]. However, in more
complex scenarios, possible temporal decorrelation of the scat-
tering and problems of cost prevent from using a large number
of passes, while navigation/orbital consideration do not allow
to obtain ideal planned uniformly spaced parallel flight tracks;
these two issues are a limitation for the current Tomo-SAR
technique [1], [8]. As a consequence, the point spread function
(PSF), i.e., the beampattern, along the h-direction is distorted.
In particular, the nonuniform baseline (spatial) sampling causes
bad imaging quality results with the Fourier-based focusing,

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LOMBARDINI AND PARDINI: 3-D SAR TOMOGRAPHY: THE MULTIBASELINE SECTOR INTERPOLATION APPROACH
in terms of contrast and ambiguities, as anomalous side and
quasi-grating lobes1 affect the PSF.
A first effort to overcome this problem was carried out
under the simplifying assumption that a single-backscattering
contribution is dominant in the examined volume mapped in the
range-azimuth cell. This hypothesis allows the reconstruction
of the received signal at some virtual baseline positions by
means of a simple interpolation algorithm [1]. In this context,
term “virtual” means that the signal at that baseline position has
not been acquired in the reality, but it has been reconstructed
by means of the interpolator. However, further investigations
showed that this algorithm may provide unsatisfactory results
when applied to scenarios comprising more than one pointlike
spaced or extended scatterers [8], because of the assumption
mismatch. In [8], the authors also tested a regularized inversion
approach to Tomo-SAR. The data focusing is formulated in the
framework of linear inverse problems, and the solution makes
use of a singular value decomposition of the relevant linear
operator, with a regularization to avoid numerical ill condi-
tioning. In [9], an adaptive beamforming technique, i.e., the
Capon beamforming, was proposed for the elevation focusing,
which was tested in [10], providing satisfactory results thanks
to its sidelobe suppression capabilities. Adaptive beamforming
allows an improvement in terms of both sidelobe level and
resolution by rejecting the spurious power contributions from
the heights different from the targeted one by adaptively placing
proper nulls; however, it may exhibit nonlinear radiometric
effects. Recently, another nonmodel-based inversion technique
has been applied to the tomographic imaging of vegetation [6].
By exploiting ancillary height data, tomographic profiles are
derived from dual-baseline data acquired in an anechoic cham-
ber under controlled conditions. Also, model-based techniques
have been taken into consideration. Examples can be found
in [11], where the MUSIC (Multiple Signal Classification)
spectral estimator was investigated as tomographic processor
with real data in order to achieve superresolution of multiple
sources compact in height, and in the 3-D inversion in [5],
where also hyperspectral data were employed.
In this letter, we propose a novel MB 3-D imaging
interpolation-based algorithm, which aims to overcome the
mentioned limitations in the elevation focusing by exploiting
the a priori information about the extension of the height
sector containing the scatterers [9]. As first step, the sector
information is conveyed to a proper matched linear interpolator
to recover virtual uniform baseline distributed data from the
nonuniform one; with well-interpolated data, the performance
limitations intrinsic in an MB sparse geometry should vanish.
Afterward, the height tomographic image can be obtained, e.g.,
by applying the classical Fourier elevation focusing to the
interpolated data. Here, after describing the MB sector matched
interpolator, we report the results of a simulated analysis car-
ried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method
under different scenarios, also with multiple and extended
backscatterers.
1 The sidelobes are the lobes of the multibaseline beampattern that are not the
main beam corresponding to the scatterer; a grating lobe has the same amplitude
of the main beam lobe.
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631
II. S ECTOR I NTERPOLATION
In the MB SAR tomography framework, we assume to
process the data from an MB nonuniform cross-track array of
K phase centers [1] (see Fig. 1). This is usually synthesized by
K repeated flight tracks of a single-channel SAR over the area
of interest. After possible motion compensation [1], K regis-
tered complex SAR images are produced. As usual in SAR
imaging and interferometry, in each SAR image, we can con-
sider N looks to reduce statistical variations, e.g., multiple ho-
mogeneous adjacent pixels. For each nth look, n = 1, . . . , N ,
the complex amplitudes of the pixels observed in the K SAR
images at a given range-azimuth cell, after possible atmospheric
compensation [8] and the deramping operation [1], are arranged
in the K × 1 vector y(n). Deramping is a phase compensation
step taking data back to the convenient far field behavior, in
which wavefronts are planar, baseline phase history linear, and
a constant spatial frequency corresponds to a given height.
Assuming the first phase center as reference (master track),
consider the K × 1 steering vector a(h), coding the MB cross-
track array response to a backscattered signal component com-
ing from the normal-to-slant range height h
a(h) = [ 1 ejωs B2 ... ejωs BK ]T . (1)
Here, ωs is a spatial frequency, related to h as ωs = 4πh/(λR),
with λ the radar wavelength, R the slant-range distance [1],
[12], and Bi , i = 2, . . . , K, are the orthogonal baselines be-
tween the ith and the master track.
The problem of the height image reconstruction for a given
range-azimuth cell, possibly using multiple looks, can be cast in
the spatial spectral estimation problem of the backscattered sig-
nal power (intensity) height distribution P (h) = E{|γ(h, n)|2 }
from the MB data y(n), with γ(h, n) the complex amplitude
height distribution for look n, and E{·} the ensemble (look)
average [1], [10], [12]. P (h) is related to y(n) by means of a
Fourier integral [1], [8]

4πBk
[y(n)]k = γ(h, n)ej λR h dh. (2)
Thus, the estimation of P (h) is obtained through the inversion
of (2). However, the spatial nonuniformity of the MB array
causes the inflation of the sidelobe effect in the estimate of
P (h), leading to ambiguities, masking, and contrast reduction
problems in the reconstructed image. Here, we tackle this
problem by estimating the output of a KV -element virtual
uniform MB array from the output of the K-element actual
nonuniform array by means of the advanced linear interpolator.
In the typical tomographic applications (e.g., forest or urban),
the extension of a height sector which contains all the scatterers
can be inferred from an a priori knowledge of the kind of
the observed scenario. As an example, volumetric or layover
scatterers are expected to span just a few meters height sector
in small tree zones or suburban areas, while for tropical forests
or downtown areas a height sector of several tens of meters
extension can be assumed. The design of the interpolator is
therefore optimized to handle general signal spatial harmonics
components originated by scatterers belonging to that height
 632 IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 5, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2008

sector [the so-called sector of interest (SOI)]. The SOI exten-

sion is merely a light a priori information [9], and it represents
an ancillary information useful to process further MB SAR
data. So doing, the nonuniform spatial samples of all the spatial
harmonics corresponding to the height scatterer distribution
in the scene are well interpolated, provided that their spatial
frequencies fall into the band corresponding to the height sector
assumed in the interpolator design.
The interpolated data vector can be expressed as

yV (n) = HI y(n) (3)

where HI is a KV × K transformation matrix (KV , K ≥ 3).

The transformation (interpolation) matrix HI can be found by
solving the following optimization problem:
 
HI = arg min  a V −G a2 (4)
H
Fig. 2. PSF (beampattern) before and after the interpolation. The ideal beam-
with H the general interpolation matrix to be optimized, while pattern (ULA) has been reported for comparison. K = 5, spatial lags [0, 1.7,
  3.2, 4.1, 7]. KV = 8.
a V = vec{AV } and a = vec{A}; vec{·} is the vec-operator
which stacks the columns of a matrix. AV and A are ma-
trices whose columns are the steering vectors of the virtual
uniform and the actual nonuniform arrays, respectively, calcu-
lated for M (M  1) spatial frequencies ωs1 , . . . , ωsM inside
the SOI (see [9]). G is a block diagonal matrix defined as
G = diag{H, H, . . . , H}, where the unknown H is repeated
M times. Notice that in (4), the difference between HI and H is
formal only, i.e., H is the matrix to be designed, whereas HI is
the result of the optimization. The solution to the minimization
problem stated in (4) can be found by using conventional rules
for the overdetermined equation systems [13].

III. N UMERICAL AND S IMULATED P ERFORMANCE

We carried out a numerical and simulated performance
analysis to test the effectiveness of the proposed method for 3-D
tomographic imaging. Several scenarios have been analyzed,
with different MB array geometries and interpolation sectors.
After the reconstruction of KV uniformly spaced spatial data
samples, the tomographic profile is derived here by applying
the conventional Fourier beamforming [1], [4], [12] to the
interpolated data.
To begin with, we analyzed the effect of the interpola-
tion on the PSF, i.e., the tomographic response to a single
pointlike scatterer located at zero height (with respect to the
reference used for deramping) in absence of thermal noise. All
the intensity curves have been normalized to their maximum
value. In what follows, the acronym NLA (nonuniform linear
array) indicates the actual nonuniform baselines, whereas ULA
(uniform LA) denotes an ideal uniform distribution (both after
deramping). In all the figures, the central band represents the
SOI extension and the dash-dotted lines indicate the source
location. We first considered the spatial lags, i.e., the Bi s in
arbitrary units, [0, 1.7, 3.2, 4.1, 7] (K = 5), resembling an
integer thinned array structure [0, 2, 3, 4, 7]. The interpolation
matrix is designed to recover the KV = 8 virtual uniform array
data with all the integer lags from 0 to 7. The analysis is
thus carried out over a height unambiguous range of seven
Fig. 3. Normalized error of interpolation as a function of the SOI width.
K = 5, spatial lags [0, 1.7, 3.2, 4.1, 7]. KV = 8.
resolution units (from −3.5 to 3.5) after interpolation, although
the unambiguous range of the NLA is slightly higher. The as-
sumed SOI measures 4.5 resolution units, more than 60% of the
whole unambiguous range; this is a quite poor a priori informa-
tion. As shown in Fig. 2, the NLA PSF presents high sidelobes
in the SOI, with a peak sidelobe level (PSL) of about −6 dB.
After interpolation, despite the only poor a priori information,
we observe a substantial improvement in the height PSF, with
an enhancement in the PSL of almost −4 dB; the sidelobe
amplitudes are now much closer to those of the ideal reference
ULA. However, the sidelobes near to the SOI boundaries are
not reduced as one might have expected. To get an insight, we
considered the spatial frequency averaged normalized error of
interpolation, which can be defined as the minimum achieved

in (4) divided by  a V2 . The error has been calculated as a
function of the SOI width and plotted in Fig. 3. It is apparent
that the largeness of the choosen SOI results in a nonnegligible
normalized error of interpolation (about 0.2); nevertheless,

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LOMBARDINI AND PARDINI: 3-D SAR TOMOGRAPHY: THE MULTIBASELINE SECTOR INTERPOLATION APPROACH
Fig. 4. PSF (beampattern) before and after the interpolation; K = 13, spatial
lags [0, 2, 2.96, 4, 5.024, 5.92, 8.04, 9.04, 10.12, 12, 16.52, 18.08, 24].
KV = 25.
Fig. 5. PSF (beampattern) before and after the interpolation, with the same
tomographic array of Fig. 4. The SOI has been nearly halved.
this can be noticeably reduced by employing a narrower SOI,
i.e., a stronger a priori information.
Fig. 4 refers to a more complex MB array structure, with
K = 13 phase centers (see the figure caption for the details).
Again, the NLA PSF has high sidelobes, with also a quasi-
grating lobe. Assuming the same SOI (15 resolution units)
relatively to the unambiguous interval of the KV = 25 in-
terpolated array, the interpolation is quite beneficial for the
sidelobes. However, the interpolation error limits the PSL gain
in the SOI. In Fig. 5, the PSF after interpolation is plotted
with a nearly halved SOI (8 resolution units); in this case, the
interpolation error reduces drastically, and the PSF of the ideal
reference ULA (not reported for the sake of graphical clarity)
is practically fully recovered. Further analyses, not reported
here for lack of space, showed that with an intermediate SOI
(12 resolution units), the achieved PSF is qualitatively similar
to that reported in Fig. 4, with a further −1dB enhancement
in the PSL. It is of interest also the response obtained with a
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633
Fig. 6. Tomographic profile of a single scatterer displaced with respect to the
SOI center, with the same tomographic array and the same SOI of Fig. 4.
Fig. 7. Tomographic profile of two compact speckled scatterers in thermal
noise before and after interpolation, with the same tomographic array and the
same SOI of Fig. 2.
source near the upper SOI limit (Fig. 6). The quasi-grating lobe
of the NLA now falls into the SOI, giving rise to possible severe
ambiguities, even if the SOI information is accounted for in the
interpretation of the conventional Fourier formed tomographic
profile. Conversely, after interpolation exploiting the SOI, the
ambiguity has been successfully removed. On the other hand,
with respect to Fig. 4, we observe some changes in the sidelobes
shapes of the tomographic profile after interpolation, denoting
a slight noninvariance of the interpolator with the heights of the
scatterers.
The following simulated results are relative to more general
scenarios involving multiple scatterers. We also introduced the
thermal noise. In Fig. 7, a realization is plotted of the NLA
and sector interpolation tomographic profile obtained with the
K = 5 phase center MB array considered at the beginning.
We considered a scene with two elevation-compact speckled
scatterers centered around height 0, and with a separation of
1.1 resolution units, both with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
 634
Fig. 8. Tomographic profile of two compact speckled scatterers in thermal
noise before and after interpolation, with the same tomographic array of Fig. 4.
The SOI measures 12 height resolution units. The result from the more classical
IBF has been reported for comparison.
of 21 dB, and N = 32 looks. Note that out-of-sector spectral
components might affect the sector interpolator behavior
(see [9] and references therein), and thermal noise samples
independent among the tracks are spatially white. However, it
is apparent how the advanced interpolator is able to improve
the tomographic profile extraction, even in presence of
out-of-sector noise. The highest sidelobe amplitude in the
SOI has been reduced by about 5 dB. The last analyzed
case considers the same scenario with two compact speckled
scatterers, but with the more complex array. Now, the scatterers
have a separation of three resolution units. SNR is again 21 dB
for each scatterer. The more classical interpolator matched to a
single dominant scatterer proposed in [1], named interpolated
beamforming (IBF) [8], has been also implemented for
comparison. A realization of the tomographic profiles is shown
in Fig. 8. Since IBF is mismatched to the multiple scatterer
scenario, it leads to higher sidelobes than the NLA near the
scatterer mainlobes, with a general worsening of the image
contrast in the SOI. On the contrary, the sidelobes in the SOI
of the tomographic profile obtained with the sector interpolator
are decreased by about −3 dB with respect to the sidelobes of
the NLA profile. Also, the two scatterers are much more neatly
separated; these two effects lead to a significantly enhanced
tomographic imaging. First preliminary tests have been carried
out also with extended speckled scatterers; they indicate that the
proposed sector interpolator still can increase the tomographic
image contrast, although with more limited gains.
IV. C ONCLUSION
In this letter, we proposed a novel imaging algorithm for
3-D SAR tomography with MB interferometric configurations.
To counteract the effects of the typical nonuniform baseline
distribution in the height image formation, we proposed to
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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 5, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2008
recover a virtual uniform baseline distribution by means of
an advanced linear MB data interpolator. A light a priori
information is exploited in the interpolator design about the
extension of the height sector which contains all the scatterers,
as it can be inferred from prior knowledge of the imaged
scenario for the typical tomographic applications (e.g., forest
or urban). To get the final height image, the Fourier focusing is
applied here to the interpolated data. The numerical and sim-
ulated performance analysis showed that the proposed sector-
matched interpolator is effective in several scenarios, also with
complex acquisition geometries and in presence of noise, and
it can outperform the more classical interpolator matched to
a single dominant scatterer. Extensive comparisons with other
tomographic processors are in order. First tests with extended
scatterers also showed room for further improvements in the
design of the interpolator. Sector interpolation-based 3-D to-
mography shows interesting potentials to exploit existing SAR
data archives and incoming SAR satellite clusters [14]. In this
framework, the second major problem of 3-D SAR tomography,
i.e., possible temporal decorrelation, has been tackled for the
first time with a robust approach in [15].
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