Application of Polarization Coherence Tomography to GB-POLInSAR Data

Abstract

Recently, a new radar imaging technique -Polarization Coherence Tomography or PCT - has been proposed in the literature. This technique uses the variation of interferometric coherence with polarization to reconstruct a vertical profile function in penetrable volume scattering. In this paper we apply PCT for the first time to ground-based polarimetric interferometric data. We first demonstrate how a vertical profile function can be efficiently represented as a Fourier-Legendre series and then show how to reconstruct this series up to second order with only single baseline data. Polarimetric tomographic reconstructions of Australian native plants show the consistencies and merits of PCT compared with other coherence based parameter retrieval models of the polarimetric SAR interferometry technique. In this paper we attempt to demonstrate the possibility of performing functional reconstruction or tomography using only a single baseline ground-based polarimetric interferometer. In Section II we review the polarimetric coherence tomography algorithm by first summarising a new POLInSAR algorithm to estimate the two important parameters required for PCT, namely height and surface topography and then by reformulating the tomographic reconstruction problem as a Fourier-Legendre series. In Section III we apply this approach to single baseline ground-based polarimetric interferometer data to reconstruct vertical tomograms based on estimation of the coefficients of the Fourier-Legendre series. Finally we provide conclusions and perspective on possible future developments and applications of this approach.