Fully Polarimetric High-Resolution 3-D Imaging With Circular SAR at L-Band

This paper presents the first fully polarimetric high-resolution circular synthetic aperture radar (CSAR) images at L-band (1.3 GHz). The circular data were acquired in 2008 by the Experimental SAR (E-SAR) airborne system of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) over the airport of Kaufbeuren, Germany. The obtained images resulting from the coherent integration of the whole circular flight are investigated and discussed in terms of two of the main CSAR properties, namely, the theoretical subwavelength resolution in the horizontal plane (x, y) and the 3-D imaging capabilities. The 3-D imaging capabilities are of special interest due to the penetration of L-band in vegetated areas. These results were compared with images processed by the incoherent addition of the full synthetic aperture. The coherent approach showed a better performance since scatterers are focused at their maximum resolution. Due to the nonlinearity of the tracks and the high-computational burden, an efficient fast factorized back-projection (FFBP) has been developed. Unlike frequency-domain processors, it accommodates azimuthal variances and topography changes. Limits and considerations of the proposed algorithm are described and discussed. To further accelerate this process, the FFBP was also implemented in a graphics processing unit (GPU). Processing performance has been assessed with the direct BP (DBP) as a reference, obtaining speedup factors up to 1800. Residual motion errors have been estimated with a new frequency-based autofocus approach for CSAR configurations based on low signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) isotropic scatterers. High-resolution images of man-made and distributed scatterers have been analyzed and compared with a stripmap SAR, both concerning anisotropic and isotropic-like scatterers. Results include a single-channel tomogram of a Luneburg lens and a fully polarimetric tomogram of a tree.