ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors consider building structure estimation from an airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. They begin with a review of work on parametric techniques that have been suggested for the detection and estimation of primary scattering mechanisms from building returns to characterize the building interior structure from standoff radar backscatter measurements. Then, the authors present a framework for through-the-wall 3D feature estimation from multi-elevation SAR apertures. They also present the system model and pose the problem of decomposing returns from a building structure in terms of scattering primitive signatures. The authors describe the proposed feature extraction algorithm. One reason for using subaperture images is that most scattering center responses persist for only a limited range of azimuth angles. Imaging with SAR data produces complex-valued reflectivity maps, whose phase contains modulation terms related to scene height and elevation angle of the radar.
