Repeat-pass space-surface bistatic SAR tomography: accurate imaging and first experiment

Space-surface bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SS-BiSAR) offers an additional observation angle for monostatic spaceborne SAR, making it a promising technology for high-accuracy deformation retrieval technology in local regions. Repeat-pass SS-BiSAR tomography can accurately estimate the surfaces of buildings and steep areas, effectively removing terrain phases during deformation retrieving. However, inaccuracies in the orbital ephemeris can lead to image geometry distortion, reducing image pair coherence, introducing interferometric phase errors, and consequently deteriorating tomographic precision. This paper precisely models the image geometry distortion and interferometric phase error caused by repeat-pass ephemeris error. We propose an ephemeris correction method based on the chirp-Z transform to address these issues. Furthermore, we introduce an accurate tomography model to improve 3D reconstruction accuracy. Our first SS-BiSAR tomography experiment, conducted using the Chinese Lutan-1 satellite, demonstrates that the correlation coefficient is improved by 0.16 after ephemeris error correction. Moreover, the density and precision of the tomographic point cloud are improved by 13.7% and 12.1%, respectively.