Polarimetric characterization of 3-D scenes using high-resolution and Full-Rank Polarimetric tomographic SAR focusing

International audienceThis paper presents new principles and techniques to perform High Resolution (HR) 3-D imaging of volumetric environments using Polarimetric SAR Tomography (POLTOMSAR) and Multi-Baseline Polarimetric and Interferometric SAR (MB-POL-inSAR) data. Unlike classical polarimetric spectral estimation approaches which consider polarization as way to improve the discrimination between vertically aligned scatterers, or to estimate unitary rank polarimetric scattering features [1] [2], this paper provides full rank techniques which permit to estimate 3-D coherency matrices that can be characterized using classical polarimetric processing algorithms. The algorithms investigated here, Beamformer, Capon and MUSIC, have a relatively low numerical complexity and varying levels of resolution. A novel approach is developed to estimate 3-D full rank polarimetric covariance matrices with HR spatial properties