Separation and Characterization of 3D Reflectivity Changes in Forest Scenarios using SAR Tomography

Abstract:
The changes in time of 3D reflectivity reconstructions obtained by means of synthetic aperture radar tomography (TomoSAR) in forest scenes are caused by changes of the physical forest structure, tree water content and surface moisture. In this paper, a framework to separate and characterize different change components is introduced by formulating the problem for the first time in terms of reflectivity components in a subspace common to two TomoSAR acquisitions. In these initial steps, the processing is not constrained by models. The potentials of the this methodology are investigated by processing real airborne TomoSAR acquisitions at L-band.