Patent ID: 7511655

Claim:
A method comprising: a) providing at least four phase-coherent synthetic aperture radar (SAR) platforms; b) transmitting a radar waveform from one of the at least four SAR platforms; c) receiving scattered energy waveform by the at least four SAR platforms, the scattered energy comprising a superposition of a plurality of point scatters in range, cross-range, and height convolved with the radar waveform; d) generating a plurality of complex two dimensional (2-D) SAR images by forming a complex 2-D SAR image at each SAR platform based on the scattered energy received at each SAR platform, each complex 2-D SAR image comprising a plurality of pixels, each pixel comprising a magnitude and a phase; e) co-registering the plurality of complex 2-D SAR images to generate a discretized 3-D space comprising a plurality of 3-D voxels, each 3-D voxel comprising a range bound, a cross-range bound, and a height bound; f) calculating three differential paired phase functions for each 3-D voxel of the plurality of 3-D voxels; g) calculating a plurality of sub-voxel positions; h) for each sub-voxel position calculation, determining whether a point scatter of the plurality of point scatters falls within a single 3-D voxel of the plurality of 3-D voxels; i) reporting a range, a cross-range, and a height of the point scatter, based on the range bound, cross-range bound, and height bound of the single 3-D voxel of the plurality of 3-D voxels, if the calculated position of the point scatter falls within the single 3-D voxel of the plurality of 3-D voxels; j) reporting a non-compliant scatter, if the calculated position of the point scatter of the plurality of point scatters does not fall within the single 3-D voxel; and k) repeating steps i) through j) until a 3-D image with sub-voxel position is generated.