Sub-canopy ground characteristics retrieval of PolinSAR using spectral analysis technique

Abstract

The advances in Polarimetric SAR Interferometry (PolInSAR) techniques provide a promising way to recover ground characteristics such as sub-canopy soil moisture and roughness using SAR data. Spectral analysis techniques have been applied to extract the vegetation and building parameters. Yamada et al proposed the ESPRIT algorithm to estimate vegetation height; Sauer et al apply the spectral analysis techniques to estimate building heights and extract physical properties from Multi-baseline (MB) PolinSAR data. In these applications, the parameters are mainly estimated from the phase information or phase center, but the validity of the sub-canopy soil backscattering or reflectivity estimation from polarimetric spectral analysis technique is not investigated. In this paper, the ground scattering center is first located by po-larimetric MUSIC algorithm and then the ground reflectivity is recovered using a polarimetric least-square method. The validity of the polarimetric spectral analysis technique for the sub-canopy ground reflectivity estimation is demonstrated using simulated and real SAR data.