Three-Dimensional Imaging of Objects Concealed Below a Forest Canopy Using SAR Tomography at L-Band and Wavelet-Based Sparse Estimation

Despite its ability to characterize 3-D environments, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomographic imaging, when applied to the characterization of targets concealed beneath forest canopies, may appear as an ill-conditioned estimation problem, with a complex mixture of numerous scattering mechanisms m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE geoscience and remote sensing letters 2017-09, Vol.14 (9), p.1454-1458
Main Authors: Yue Huang, Levy-Vehel, Jacques, Ferro-Famil, Laurent, Reigber, Andreas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Canopies
Canopy
Conditioning
Data acquisition
Engineering Sciences
Estimation
Forest canopy
Forests
Imaging techniques
Medical imaging
Minimization
Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar tomography
Radar
Radar imaging
Resolution
SAR (radar)
Scattering
Signal and Image processing
sparse estimation
Synthetic aperture radar
Tomography
underfoliage
Wavelet analysis
Wavelet transforms
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Summary:Despite its ability to characterize 3-D environments, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomographic imaging, when applied to the characterization of targets concealed beneath forest canopies, may appear as an ill-conditioned estimation problem, with a complex mixture of numerous scattering mechanisms measured from a few different positions. Among the set of tomographic estimators that may be used to characterize such complex scattering environments, nonparametric tomographic techniques are more robust to focus on artifacts but limited in resolution and, hence, may fail to discriminate objects, whereas parametric ones provide better vertical resolution but cannot adequately handle continuously distributed volumetric scattering densities, characteristic of forest canopies. This letter addresses a new wavelet-based sparse tomographic estimation method for the 3-D imaging and discrimination of underfoliage objects that overcomes these limitations. The effectiveness of this new approach is demonstrated using L-band airborne tomographic SAR data acquired by the German Aerospace Center over Dornstetten, Germany.
ISSN:1545-598X
1558-0571
DOI:10.1109/LGRS.2017.2709839