Partially Coherent Scatterers in SAR Tomography: An Application on COSMO-SkyMed Data

Decorrelation is a major drawback in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometry (InSAR) processing, causing poor density of measurement points, mainly outside of urbanized areas. SAR Tomography is one of the most suitable multi-temporal InSAR technique for built environment monitoring. Although typically capable of identifying a large number of scatterers, SAR Tomography detectors suffer the assumption of fully coherent scatterer response, which can be restrictive in real cases. In this work we address the test of a detector of partially correlated scatterers on a real COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) dataset, which was previously derived in the literature [1] as a Rao test for the single-look case and is here extended to the multi-look scenario. Experimental results are compared with those achieved by the Multi-look Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (MGLRT). Both Partial Correlation and MGLRT have been implemented with a fixed multi-look degree.