Robust TomoSAR focusing for forest height retrieval

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss and present analysis on robust reconstruction of vertical structure of forested area suing multi-baseline synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. To deal with problem of low signal to noise (SNR) ratio, robust non-local (NL) techniques of covariance matrix estimation are employed and compared with classical multi-looking approaches. The analysis will consider the quality of the vertical structure profile in such a way to cover the reconstruction quality using both single and fully polarimetric MB data sets. To evaluate the three-dimensional imaging of volumetric media in case of fully polarimetric images, the sum of Kronecker product (SKP) of covariance matrix in which polarization is considered as a way to discriminate the vertically aligned scatterers. From the experimental results, the impact of NL neighborhoods in robust estimation of covariance matrix to resolve the interference signals (e.g. layover) is the most relevant conclusion of the paper.