Fundamentals of Bistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar

This chapter gives an overview of the main issues of BSAR for airborne and spaceborne remote sensing applications. A brief review of the state-of-the-art in bistatic radar is made, showing both limitations in availability of bistatic systems and data and the great interest for their potentialities, and then BSAR geometry is presented. Ground range and azimuth resolutions are investigated, considering various antenna formations and showing their dependence on bistatic observation geometry. Finally, the main scientific applications of BSAR data are presented, considering both results reported in the literature and original techniques. Advantages of multi-angle BSAR observations for rough surfaces characterisation and discrimination are pointed out. Special emphasis is given to topographic applications, presenting techniques based on tailoring multi-range measurements and stereo-radargrammetric methods to bistatic geometry for obtaining terrain elevation measurements.