First results towards the retrieval of agricultural crop structure by means of Polarimetric SAR Interferometry

Abstract:
In the last years, a large effort is being devoted to the monitoring of the earth’s vegetation cover, due to its vital importance in environmental science and climate change studies. Pol-InSAR, by combining both polarimetric and interferometric techniques, represents a powerful tool to fulfil the task of monitoring the vegetation height and the crop canopy structure. In this work, a simple model-based inversion scheme is presented, which takes advantage of the multi-baseline extended observation space in order to provide a unique estimate of the Oriented Volume over Ground structural parameters (e.g. vegetation height and differential extinction) without a priori information. The algorithm has been then tested on a dataset of airborne SAR (DLR’s F-SAR) repeat-pass acquisitions (L-, C- and X-band) over agricultural crops.