A multilevel interferometric SAR simulator

A novel simulator is presented for interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), which contains three simulation levels: the raw signal level (RSL), the SLC image level (SIL) and the interferometric phase level (IPL). In this simulator, a new model of complex backscattering coefficients for the extended scene with low complexity is presented and validated. Furthermore the implementation details of the multilevel simulator are discussed. For the raw signal level, a new model with higher computation efficiency to generate the radar echo is proposed. For the image level, an efficient approach to create single-look image pair is presented. For the interferometric phase level, a reasonable noise model related to geometric decorrelation is also proposed. Finally some meaningful results by the novel simulator are presented. These results demonstrate not only the validity of the proposed simulator but also the conformability of the three simulation levels.