Abstract:

Vegetation height inversion results of three-stage inversion process for polarimetric SAR interferometry are seriously affected by the inaccuracies of the underlying ground topographic phase estimation. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a new algorithm. This algorithm which combines the Freeman-Durden polarimetric decomposition concept and polarimetric interferometry covariance matrix decomposition obtains the more accurate results. Then it can estimate the vegetation height by applying the RVOG model. Finally, the validity of the proposed algorithm has been tested with the simulated L-band PolInSAR data from PolSARProSim software by ESA and real ALOS PALSAR data covered Amazon forest, and the experiment results show the proposed algorithm is more accurate than the tranditional three-stage inversion process.

Key words: polarimetric interferometric SAR, vegetation estimation, polarimetric interferometric covariance matrix, RVOG