SAR Tomographic Inversion of Urban Areas via Morphology Regularization

Abstract:
The current synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images with ultra high resolution provide the detailed structures of the urban areas, which are often utilized to retrieve 3D spatial information of the detailed structures based on tomographic synthetic aperture radar (TomoSAR). Compressive sensing (CS), as a favorable sparse reconstruction technique has been widely used in TomoSAR, however, the sparsity constraints by CS algorithms often lose detailed structures of the targets due to the pixel-wise processing. In this paper, we apply the morphology regularization as a prior term to form a novel approach based on the CS algorithm. The morphology regularization can shrink the concatenations caused by outliers in the iterative reconstruction, enhancing the detailed structural properties of reconstructed targets. And the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is applied, where the Bregman iteration is adopted for solving the sub-problem with the morphology regularization. Both simulation experiments and tests on real data show that the proposed method can suppress the outliers and preserve the detailed structures of tomographic reconstruction, leading to improved correctness and completeness.