Polarimetric SAR Interferometry (PolInSAR) and Inversion Modelling

Polarimetric SAR Interferometry (PolInSAR) is an advanced technique (Cloude and Papathanassiou, 1998) of Radar remote sensing that combines the advantages of Polarimetry and Interferometry. Using SAR Polarimetry target characteristics such as its orientation, material constituents (Boerner, 2006, 2004), shape and dielectric properties (Krieger et al.., 2005), permittivity as well as ensemble average entropy (Lee et al.., 2002; Neumann et al.., 2010) can be estimated. SAR Interferometry provides information on the coherence of the scattering mechanisms (Hellmann and Cloude, 2007) and the object’s spatial (range/in-depth) structure (Boerner, 2004) and estimates the location of the scatterer in vertical plane through the phase difference in the images acquired from spatially separated apertures at either ends of a baseline (Krieger et al.., 2005). Combination of polarimetry and interferometry leads to separation of scattering mechanisms within a resolution cell. For complex scattering media such as forests, various types of scatterers are present below the canopy. The underlying scattering mechanisms can be interpreted using PolInSAR (Hellmann and Cloude, 2007) as the scattering media physical properties are closely related to the polarimetric features observed. The polarimetric and interferometric information are complementary to each other which leads to the combination of both approaches in Polarimetric SAR Interferometry (PolInSAR). Cloude and Papathanassiou formulated the PolInSAR theory (Cloude and Papathanassiou, 1998) and demonstrated its applications using single-baseline PolInSAR data (Papathanassiou and Cloude, 2001) and its extension to multi-baseline data is presented in (Neumann et al.., 2010).