Impact of focusing of Ground Based SAR data on the quality of interferometric SAR applications

A Ground-Based Synthetic Aperture Radar (GB-SAR) is nowadays employed in several applications. The processing of ground-based, space and airborne SAR data relies on the same physical principles. Nevertheless specific algorithms for the focusing of data acquired by GB-SAR system have been proposed in literature. In this work the impact of the main focusing methods on the interferometric phase dispersion and on the coherence has been studied by employing a real dataset obtained by carrying out an experiment. Several acquisitions of a scene with a corner reflector mounted on a micrometric screw have been made; before some acquisitions the micrometric screw has been displaced of few millimetres in the Line-of-Sight direction. The images have been first focused by using two different algorithms and correspondently, two different sets of interferograms have been generated. The mean and standard deviation of the phase values in correspondence of the corner reflector have been compared to those obtained by knowing the real displacement of the micrometric screw. The mean phase and its dispersion and the coherence values for each focusing algorithm have been quantified and both the precision and the accuracy of the interferometic phase measurements obtained by using the two different focusing methods have been assessed.