YINSAR: a compact, low-cost synthetic aperture radar

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has proven useful for many different applications. Many more applications would be possible with a low-cost instrument. To address this need, BYU has developed its interferometric SAR, YINSAR. This compact, low-cost system is operated from a four passenger aircraft. This paper reports the current status of YINSAR. We report the results of some new theoretical work and empirical tests regarding the performance of interferometric SAR. We show data collected with the YINSAR hardware empirically verifying the theoretical statistics of interferograms and estimate the accuracy and sensitivity of this instrument. We describe a new method of combining interferograms from multiple baselines to reduce the error in the final height map.