Multibaseline polarimetric synthetic aperture radar tomography of forested areas using wavelet-based distribution compressive sensing

The three-dimensional (3-D) structure of forests, especially the vertical structure, is an important parameter of forest ecosystem modeling for monitoring ecological change. Synthetic aperture radar tomography (TomoSAR) provides scene reflectivity estimation of vegetation along elevation coordinates. Due to the advantages of super-resolution imaging and a small number of measurements, distribution compressive sensing (DCS) inversion techniques for polarimetric SAR tomography were successfully developed and applied. This paper addresses the 3-D imaging of forested areas based on the framework of DCS using fully polarimetric (FP) multibaseline SAR interferometric (MB-InSAR) tomography at the P-band. A new DCS-based FP TomoSAR method is proposed: a new wavelet-based distributed compressive sensing FP TomoSAR method (FP-WDCS TomoSAR method). The method takes advantage of the joint sparsity between polarimetric channel signals in the wavelet domain to jointly inverse the reflectivity profiles in each channel. The method not only allows high accuracy and super-resolution imaging with a low number of acquisitions, but can also obtain the polarization information of the vertical structure of forested areas. The effectiveness of the techniques for polarimetric SAR tomography is demonstrated using FP P-band airborne datasets acquired by the ONERA SETHI airborne system over a test site in Paracou, French Guiana. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI. [DOI: 10.1117/1.JRS.9 .095048]