TanDEM-X Pol-InSAR Performance for Forest Height Estimation

TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X platforms form together the first spaceborne single-pass polarimetric interferometer in space. This allows, for the first time, the acquisition of spaceborne polarimetric synthetic aperture radar interferometry (Pol-InSAR) data without the disturbing effect of temporal decorr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing 2014-10, Vol.52 (10), p.6404-6422
Main Authors: Kugler, Florian, Schulze, Daniel, Hajnsek, Irena, Pretzsch, Hans, Papathanassiou, Konstantinos P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acquisitions
Acquisitions & mergers
Coherence
Extraterrestrial measurements
Forest
forest height
forest parameter
Forests
Interferometers
Interferometry
Inversions
Laser radar
Marketing
Orbits
polarimetric synthetic aperture radar interferometry (Pol-InSAR)
Radar
Satellites
Spaceborne radar
Synthetic aperture radar
synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
TanDEM-X
TerraSAR-X
Vegetation
X-band
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Summary:TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X platforms form together the first spaceborne single-pass polarimetric interferometer in space. This allows, for the first time, the acquisition of spaceborne polarimetric synthetic aperture radar interferometry (Pol-InSAR) data without the disturbing effect of temporal decorrelation. This paper aims to assess the potential of such data for forest applications. For this, single- and dual-pol data acquired over a boreal, a temperate, and a tropical site were investigated to characterize X-band penetration and polarization diversity of the interferometric coherence measurements. Pol-InSAR forest height inversion schemes have been proposed and implemented for the singleand dual-pol cases and cross validated against LIDAR reference measurements for all sites. The single-pol inversion relies on an external ground digital terrain model (DTM) and performed well for all sites with correlation coefficients r 2 between 0.80 and 0.98. The dual-pol inversion does not require an external DTM but depends on the visibility of the whole forest layer. Accordingly, its performance varied with forest structure and season: The best performance was achieved for the summer acquisition of the boreal test site (r 2 = 0.86) and for the winter acquisition of the temperate test site (r 2 = 0.77). For the tropical test site, only a weak correlation (r 2 = ~0.50) could be established.
ISSN:0196-2892
1558-0644
DOI:10.1109/TGRS.2013.2296533