Forest height reconstruction by a multibaseline approach: experimental results

The results concerning a recent activity aimed at the experimental characterization of the performance of a forest height reconstruction algorithm using multi-baseline, fully-polarimetric SAR data are presented. The algorithm employed in this first experimental testing is based on a two-layer vegetation model and amounts at optimizing an objective functional accounting for the distance between the theoretically predicted coherency function and that calculated from the acquired data. A constrained optimization is performed to exploit the available a priori information on the investigated scene and a discrete regularization approach is applied. Dual-baseline fully-polarimetric airborne data acquired by the E-SAR System of DLR during the Traunstein campaign have been used to provide a first experimental characterization of the algorithm performance.