Multipath Model and Suppression in Airborne Array-InSAR Tomography

Array interferometric synthetic aperture radar (array-InSAR) is a useful sensor to reconstruct urban 3-D point clouds. However, the multipath interference of electromagnetic wave is very obvious in the reconstructed 3-D point clouds, seriously affecting the recognition, extraction, and modeling of the building. In this letter, the authors propose a simple multipath suppression method to improve the quality of point clouds of the array-InSAR, which mainly utilizes the characteristics of secondary and tertiary scattering. The performance of the method is verified through real airborne array-InSAR data. Experimental results show that the proposed method can automatically obtain large scene urban 3-D point clouds without multipath interference.