One-sided ascending or descending Synthetic Aperture Radar（SAR） stereoradargrammetry has limited accuracy of topographic mapping due to the short spatial baseline（-100 km） and small intersection angle. In order to improve the performance and reliability of generating digital elevation model（DEM） from spaceborne SAR radargrammetry, an exploration of two-sided stereoradargrammetry from the combination of ascending and descending orbits with geometric configuration of long spatial baseline（-1000 km） was conducted in this study. The slant-range geometry between SAR sensors to the earth surface and the Doppler positioning equations were employed to establish the stereoscopic intersection model. The measurement uncertainty of two-sided radargrammetric elevation was estimated on the basis of radar parallax of homogeneous points between input SAR images. Two stereo-pairs of ALOS/PALSAR（Advanced Land Observing Satellite/Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar） acquisitions with the orbital separation almost 1080 km over the west Sichuan foreland basin with rolling topography in southwestern China were employed in the study to obtain the up-to-date terrain data after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake that hit this area. Thequantitative accuracy assessment of two-sided radargrammetric DEM was performed with reference to field GPS observations. The experimental results show that the elevation accuracy reaches 5.5 m without ground control points（GCPs） used, and the accuracy is further improved to 1.5 m with only one GPS GCP used as the least constraint. The theoretical analysis and testing results demonstrate that the twosided long baseline SAR radargrammetry from the ascending and descending orbits can be a very promising technical alternative for large-area and high accuracy topographic mapping.
In order to overcome the limitation of cross correlation coregistration method for Synthetic Aperture Radar （SAR） interferometric pairs with low coherence, a new image coregistration algorithm based on Fringe Definition Detection （FDD） is presented in this paper. The Fourier transformation was utilized to obtain spectrum characteristics of interferometric fringes. The ratio between spectrum mean and peak was proposed as the evaluation index for identifying homologous pixels from interferometric images. The satellites ERS-1/2 C-band SAR acquisitions covering the Yangtze River plain delta, eastern China and ALOS/PALSAR L-band images over the Longmen Shan mountainous area, southwestern China were respectively employed in the experiment to validate the proposed coregistration method. The testing results suggested that the derived Digital Elevation Model （DEM） from FDD method had good agreement with that from the cross correlation method as well as the reference DEM at high coherence area. However, The FDD method achieved a totally improved topographic mapping accuracy by 24 percent in comparison to the cross correlation method. The FDD method also showed better robustness and achieved relatively higher performance for SAR image eoregistration in mountainous areas with low coherence.
YANG Ying-huiCHEN QiangLIU Guo-xiangLi Zhi-linCHENG Hai-qinLiu Li-yao
