Estimation of surface topography from stereo SAR images

The authors present a practical method for estimation of surface topography from opposite-side synthetic aperture radar (SAR) stereo images. The method uses a shape-from-shading (SFS) algorithm to recover needle maps, a facet model to extract features invariant to grazing direction, the successive-over-relaxation technique to construct a low-resolution depth image, and the Frankot-Chellappa (1987) SFS algorithm to reconstruct a high-resolution digital terrain map. The method does not require auxiliary data such as control points and can cope with large intersection angle SAR stereo image pairs with large intersection angles. Experimental results with simulated SAR images are presented