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Polarization coherence tomography
Author(s) -
Cloude Shane R.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
radio science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.371
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1944-799X
pISSN - 0048-6604
DOI - 10.1029/2005rs003436
Subject(s) - interferometry , radar , tomography , polarimetry , remote sensing , inversion (geology) , coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) , a priori and a posteriori , computer science , algorithm , optics , scattering , physics , geology , telecommunications , epistemology , structural basin , quantum mechanics , paleontology , philosophy
In this paper we introduce a new radar‐imaging technique, called polarization coherence tomography (PCT), which employs variation of the interferometric coherence with polarization to reconstruct a vertical profile function in penetrable volume scattering. We first show how this profile function can be efficiently represented as a Fourier‐Legendre series, with tomographic reconstruction reducing to estimation of the unknown coefficients of this series from coherence data. We then show that we can linearize this inversion by using a priori knowledge of two parameters, namely, volume depth and topographic phase. We further propose a new algorithm based on polarimetric interferometry to estimate these two from the data itself. To assess stability, we investigate both the single‐ and dual‐baseline conditioning of the associated matrix inversion and then concentrate on the single‐baseline case to demonstrate that for sufficient multilooking (around 50), stable retrievals of profiles can be obtained in the presence of coherence noise. Finally, we apply the technique to simulated L band coherent radar data to demonstrate its potential for new applications in radar remote sensing.