Experiments of Tomography-based SAR Techniques with P-band Polarimetric Data

New opportunities are arising in the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observation of forest scenarios, especially with decimetric and metric radio wavelengths, which possess the capability of penetrating into volumes. Given its capabilities in the three-dimensional imaging of the scattering properties of the observed scene, SAR Tomography (Tomo-SAR) constitutes a good candidate for the analysis of the vertical structure of the forest. In this work, the results are presented of the application of tomography-based SAR techniques to P-band airborne data over a boreal forest from the ESA BioSAR-1 project. Results of an adaptive tomographic analysis are presented, also with a low resolution dataset, which emulates a satellite acquisition. In order to mitigate the geometric perspective effects due to the poor range resolution, the principle is introduced of the application of a common band pre-filtering to tomography. Then, a coherent layer canceller is derived to possibly apply interferometric techniques conceived for single layer scenarios to two layer scenarios. Finally, a stabilized adaptive polarimetric Tomo-SAR (PolTomo-SAR) method is proposed for estimating the 3D polarimetric scattering mechanism of the scene with low distorsions.

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