Abstract
After almost two decades of long investigations into 3D imaging of natural environments, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography (TomoSAR) is now at an operational level. Yet, a major problem that limits the potential of TomoSAR is related to the temporal decorrelation of natural scatterers during multitemporal multibaseline data acquisition. In this paper, a comparative investigation into the effect of temporal decorrelation between employed polarizations is presented. A particular focus is put on practical and statistical analysis of the dispersion of polarimetric vertical reflectivity in the presence of temporal decorrelation. The analysis is based on the synthesis of all feasible polarimetric responses of a given scatterer from its measurements of a linear orthonormal basis. Such an analysis offers a comprehension of the expected level of temporal decorrelation in TomoSAR focusing with respect to employed polarization. The analysis was performed by simulating temporal decorrelation with different terms, depending on the vertical structure and polarization, which are important aspects in a forest scenario. Moreover, the experiment was extended to a P-band dataset relative to the forest site of Remningstorp, Sweden, which was acquired through the German Aerospace Center’s experimental SAR (E-SAR) airborne system in the framework of the European Space Agency (ESA) campaign BioSAR.
Highlights
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography (TomoSAR) with resolution capabilities in the height dimension is today well assessed and widely exploited in remote sensing of complex scenarios, such as agricultural and forested areas [1,2,3,4]
This paper introduced a comparative practical analysis on the behavior of temporal decorrelation with respect to the employed polarization
The main insight of this paper lies in a polarization synthesis from a multibaseline fully polarimetric dataset, which allowed for a reconstruction of the vertical reflectivity in any desired polarization basis, leading to full characterization of the target’s response in multidimensional space
Summary
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography (TomoSAR) with resolution capabilities in the height dimension is today well assessed and widely exploited in remote sensing of complex scenarios, such as agricultural and forested areas [1,2,3,4]. Given multitemporal MB data, the accuracy and potential of TomoSAR can be limited by temporal coherence loss of natural scatterers due to their geometrical and dielectric changes in the interferometric time interval In this case, possible effects ranging from blurring to defocusing can arise in the temporal synthesis of the elevation array [7,8]. The most important consequence of the polarization synthesis process was the full characterization of the scatterer under temporal decorrelation, allowing for better identification of the optimal polarization for tomographic processing algorithms This will pave the way for comprehension of the expected effects of temporal decorrelation in TomoSAR focusing with respect to the employed polarization, complementing frequency-oriented studies. Further discussions and conclusions on the results reported by the analyses are given in Sections 6 and 7
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