Spaceborne Polarimetric SAR Interferometry: Performance Analysis and Mission Concepts
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Spaceborne Polarimetric SAR Interferometry: Performance Analysis and Mission Concepts Gerhard Krieger Microwaves and Radar Institute, German Aerospace Centre (DLR) e.V., P.O. Box 1116, 82230 Wessling, Germany Email: [email protected]
Konstantinos Panagiotis Papathanassiou Microwaves and Radar Institute, German Aerospace Centre (DLR) e.V., P.O. Box 1116, 82230 Wessling, Germany Email: [email protected]
Shane R. Cloude School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia Email: [email protected] Received 30 July 2004; Revised 3 January 2005 We investigate multichannel imaging radar systems employing coherent combinations of polarimetry and interferometry (PolInSAR). Such systems are well suited for the extraction of bio- and geophysical parameters by evaluating the combined scattering from surfaces and volumes. This combination leads to several important differences between the design of Pol-InSAR sensors and conventional single polarisation SAR interferometers. We first highlight these differences and then investigate the Pol-InSAR performance of two proposed spaceborne SAR systems (ALOS/PalSAR and TerraSAR-L) operating in repeat-pass mode. For this, we introduce the novel concept of a phase tube which enables (1) a quantitative assessment of the Pol-InSAR performance, (2) a comparison between different sensor configurations, and (3) an optimization of the instrument settings for different Pol-InSAR applications. The phase tube may hence serve as an interface between system engineers and application-oriented scientists. The performance analysis reveals major limitations for even moderate levels of temporal decorrelation. Such deteriorations may be avoided in single-pass sensor configurations and we demonstrate the potential benefits from the use of future bi- and multistatic SAR interferometers. Keywords and phrases: synthetic aperture radar, polarimetric SAR interferometry, bistatic radar, remote sensing, temporal decorrelation, forest parameter inversion.
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INTRODUCTION
One of the key challenges facing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing is to force evolution from highresolution qualitative imaging to accurate high-resolution quantitative measurement. However, quantitative estimation of relevant physical parameters from SAR data is in general nontrivial due to the fact that the radar measurables are not directly related to the desired parameters. Thus, the extraction of bio- and geophysical parameters often requires the inversion of scattering models that relate the radar observables to physical parameters of the scattering process. Due to the complexity of electromagnetic (EM) scattering This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
processes, even simple scattering models contain more parameters than the number of observables offered by a conventional sin
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