Recovering height information from SAR images of terrain

We suggest a new approach for recovering 3-D depth from a. field of surface normals. The surface normals are extracted from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images using the radar reflectivity function and local statistical estimations. Reconstructing the 3-D surface from the flow of surface normals has an inexact solution due to missing information. A two stage algorithm is proposed for calculating the height information. In the first stage a site of unknown height and one of known height are chosen according to the orientation of the surface normal component in the horizontal plane. In the second stage a gradient updating algorithm is used for calculating the unknown height. We apply the proposed algorithm on SAR images of the terrain.