Performance of PolSAR backscatter and PolInSAR coherence for scattering characterization of forest vegetation using single pass X-band spaceborne synthetic aperture radar data

Abstract. Airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data have been successfully used for forest height inversion; however, there is limited applicability in spaceborne scenarios due to high temporal decorrelation. This study investigates the potential of a high-resolution fully polarimetric interferometric pair of TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X SAR data with no temporal decorrelation to analyze the backscatter and coherence response and to implement polarimetric SAR interferometry-based height inversion algorithms. The data were acquired over Barkot forest region of Uttarakhand state in India. Yamaguchi decomposition was implemented onto the dataset to express total backscatter as a sum of different scattering components from a single SAR resolution cell. Coherency matrix was used to compute complex coherence for different polarization channels. Forest areas suffered from low coherence due to volume decorrelation, whereas a dry river bed had shown high coherence. The coherence amplitude inversion approach overestimated the forest height and also resulted in false heights for this dry river bed. These limitations were overcome by implementing three-stage inversion modeling, which assumes polarization-independent volume coherence. The results were validated using ground truth data available for 49 plots, and the latter was found to be more accurate with an overall accuracy of 90.15% and root-mean-square error of 2.42 m.

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