Forest Height Extraction from PolInSAR Image Using a Hybrid Method

Forest height is one of the most important vegetation vertical structure for many forest management activities. It is closely related with forest biomass and absorption of carbon. PolInSAR is a promising remote sensing technique that has been frequently used for extracting forest height. Recently, there have been plenty of research on the retrieval of vegetation parameters by single frequency single baseline PolInSAR such as the ESPRIT method, three-stage inversion. However, these methods tend to underestimate the forest height due to attenuations of the electromagnetic waves in the ground medium. This paper proposes a method to improve the accuracy of forest height estimation. This method is based on a fusion of hybrid method extracting forest parameters and the coherence amplitude method. The proposed algorithm performance is evaluated with simulated data from PolSARProSim software and ALOS PALSAR L-band polarimetric interferometric SAR data.