First Multi-Frequency Investigation of SAR Tomography for Vertical Structure of Agricultural Crops

Abstract

In the last years tomographic SAR (TomoSAR) raised great interest in the field of vegetation remote sensing primarily focused on forest vertical structure. The focus of this work is to investigate the application of TomoSAR techniques for the retrieval of vertical structure of agricultural vegetation. A structural analysis for crops is the key to address especially the characterisation of the layers possibly with different orientations that are present inside a crop and the amount of scattering coming from the ground at high frequencies, two issues which are still open. First results on the retrieval of the 3-D scattering distribution from airborne multi-baseline polarimetric SAR data are shown and discussed regarding differences in crop types, polarisation and frequencies.