Abstract:

It is significant to study the calibration method without artificial calibrators in terrain mapping and other applications of airborne InSAR in mountainous areas. A new calibration method based on reference DEM without any artificial calibrators is presented in this paper. A reference DEM with known accuracy is used to compare with the DEM generated from InSAR by simulated SAR image. A number of tie points are selected to be ground control points to build the sensitivity matrix via simulated SAR image. Resolving methods are improved based on sensitivity model and the processing of InSAR is combined with calibration to generate DEM. At last, the interferometric parameters are calibrated and the difference between InSAR DEM and reference DEM is calculated to evaluation the precision of calibration. This paper also illustrates the efficiency of this method to airborne InSAR data.

Key words: airborne interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), interferometric calibration, DEM, artificial calibrators, sensitivity matrix model