SAR tomography for spatio-temporal inversion of point-like scatterers in urban areas

Persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI) assumes the presence of a single temporally coherent scatterer in a range-azimuth pixel. Multiple scatterers interfering in the same pixel, as for the case of a layover, are typically rejected. Conventional SAR tomography (3D SAR) is a means to separate the individual scatterers in layover. Advanced tomographic inversion approaches employing extended phase models additionally allow simultaneous retrieval of scatterer elevation and deformation parameters. In this way, SAR tomography can increase deformation sampling and thereby complement a PSI-based analysis. This paper investigates the use of tomography as an add-on to PSI for spatio-temporal inversion of single and double scatterers in urban areas. Results are provided on an interferometric stack of 50 stripmap TerraSAR-X images acquired over the city of Barcelona.