Radar Pose Estimation and Structure-from-Motion for Airborne Circular VideoSAR

A working video synthetic aperture radar (VideoSAR) can obtain continuous observations of a region of interest from different viewpoints, meaning those observations naturally contain 3D information for positioning. This paper reports our preliminary studies on SAR scene structure-from-motion using several frames extracted from a VideoSAR sequence. In contrast to classic stereo-radargrammetric workflow, the radar pose is estimated only with information measured by radar. The coordinates of each scattering point are calculated by least-square optimization. We also develop an affine transformation aware dense matching framework to accurately measure pixel-level correspondence between frames. Experiments on real VideoSAR data demonstrate the validity of our approach.