IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - October 2021 - 4

Feature Article:
DOI. No. 10.1109/MAES.2021.3100362
A Ground-Based Interferometric Synthetic Aperture
Radar Design and Experimental Study for Surface
Deformation Monitoring
Yee-Kit Chan , Voon-Chet Koo , William How-Hsin Hii, and
Chee-Siong Lim
, Multimedia University, Melaka 75450, Malaysia
INTRODUCTION
Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technology
is a technology developed based on the basis
of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and it represents
another branch of advanced SAR development direction.
InSAR technology extends the measurement of
SAR from two-dimensional (2-D) image to 3-D space.
It has the advantages of large coverage, high accuracy,
and it becomes a particularly important remote sensing
technology. The InSAR system is implemented via two
independent SAR receiving channels on the SAR flight
platform (maintaining a constant distance between the
antennas of the two channels) and measuring the same
area on the ground [1], [2].
Interferometric processing is performed via two SAR
images to obtain an interference phase map (interferogram),
and then a phase extraction algorithm is used to
calculate the distance difference between the target and
different antennas, and the height value of the ground target
can be estimated based on the imaging geometry relationship
of the SAR system [3], [4]. At the end of the year
2000, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission satellite
jointly developed by the USA, Germany, and Italy was
successfully launched [5], [6]. Using the dual-antenna
radar interferometry technique, it successfully imaged
nearly 80% of the earth's land surface during its ten days
flight mission and generated the corresponding 3-D SAR
Authors' current address: Y.-K. Chan, V.-C. Koo, W.
H.-H. Hii, C.-S. Lim, Faculty of Engineering and Technology,
Multimedia University, Melaka 75450, Malaysia
(e-mail: ykchan@mmu.edu.my; vckoo@mmu.edu.my;
williamhii@gmail.com; cslim@mmu.edu.my).
Manuscript received July 28, 2020, revised May 9,
2021; accepted June 2, 2021, and ready for publication
July 24, 2021.
Review handled by Daniel O'Hagan.
0885-8985/21/$26.00 ß 2021 IEEE
4
images. The measurement accuracy generated by InSAR
images is about 6 m, and the 3-D comprehensive terrain
information generated by the acquired data can be used
for many applications includes but not limited to navigation
and military.
Implementing interferometric SAR is not technically
simple, because several major geometric technical parameters
of SAR will affect the accuracy of SAR raw data,
which include platform, flight path, microwave signal,
geomorphology, weather conditions, atmospheric absorption,
etc. Each factor may involve several parameters that
cause the extraction of phase information to contain
errors. Therefore, interferometric data processing technology

https://www.orcid.org/0000-0003-3953-8433 https://www.orcid.org/0000-0002-3617-1069 https://www.orcid.org/0000-0001-8523-8373

IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - October 2021

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