Advanced high resolution SAR interferometry of urban areas with airborne millimetrewave radar

For rural and natural scenes, synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) has long been an operational technique for the generation of digital surface models. With the advent of sensors providing data in the decimetre resolution domain, also the analysis of densely built-up urban areas has become an increasingly important research topic. Due to the complexity of this kind of scenes, however, advanced interferometric techniques have to be employed. While usually satellite-borne stacks of multi-temporal data are collected in order to make use of differential SAR interferometry or the increasingly popular persistent scatterer technique, this article aims at the utilization of an airborne single-pass multi-baseline system working in the millimetrewave domain. Starting from the description of the exemplary German MEMPHIS sensor, the complete processing chain from the collection of necessary navigation data over the focusing of the raw SAR data to finally the application of sophisticated InSAR techniques is shown.