Analysis of the Requirements for Tomographic SAR Acquisitions for 3-D Forest Structure Applications

Conference: EUSAR 2021 - 13th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar
03/29/2021 - 04/01/2021 at online

Proceedings: EUSAR 2021

Pages: 6Language: englishTyp: PDF

Authors:
Cazcarra-Bes, Victor; Pardini, Matteo; Papathanassiou, Konstantinos (German Aerospace Center (DLR),Microwaves and Radar Institute, Wessling, Germany.)

Abstract:
Synthetic Aperture Radar Tomography (TomoSAR) is the unique remote sensing technique able to extract 3-D information over forests at global scale, with continuous coverage and independently of cloud coverage. However, the usual low number of acquisitions in TomoSAR limits its imaging capability to extract 3-D forest information. In this paper, different number and distributions of acquisitions are analyzed in terms of vertical resolution and peak-sidelobe level (PSL). Simulations of TomoSAR data supported by point cloud lidar for realistic scenarios are discussed in terms of vertical profiles. The results show that, for a limited number of tracks, a non-uniform distribution with higher vertical resolution and PSL is necessary to characterize different forest structure types.