An Iterative, Generalized, Hybrid Decomposition on Fully Polarimetric SAR Data for Soil Moisture Retrieval under Vegetation

Conference: EUSAR 2014 - 10th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar
06/03/2014 - 06/05/2014 at Berlin, Germany

Proceedings: EUSAR 2014

Pages: 4Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Jagdhuber, Thomas; Hajnsek, Irena; Papathanassiou, Konstantinos P. (Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, Schafmattstr. 6, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland; German Aerospace Center, Muenchner Str. 20, 82234 Wessling, Germany)

Abstract:
An iterative, generalized, hybrid decomposition is developed for soil moisture retrieval under vegetation and applied on L-band, fully polarimetric SAR data of DLR’s airborne E-SAR sensor, acquired during the AgriSAR campaign in 2006 at the Demmin research site, North of Berlin, Germany. This novel decomposition type combines model-based and eigen-based decomposition methods in a 'hybrid' sense and features a generalized volume component, which is physically constrained and iteratively adapted to obtain not only positive ground components, but also invertible ones for polarimetric surface scattering models. The inversion results for soil moisture under vegetation cover exhibit a very high inversion rate with more than 96% for all acquisitions covering the entire growing season. In addition, the validation with in situ measurements from a variety of crop fields in different phenological stages reveals a very promising accuracy of 3.4vol.% in root mean square error (RMSE)