Advances in extra wide-band multi-modal air/space-borne radar polarimetry, POL-IN-SAR imaging and its applications

Radar Polarimetry, Radar Interferometry and Polarimetric SAR Interferometry represent the current culmination in ´Microwave Remote Sensing´ technology, but we still need to progress very considerably in order to reach the limits of physical realizability. Whereas with radar polarimetry the textural fine-structure, target orientation, symmetries and material constituents can be recovered with considerable improvement above that of standard ´amplitude-only´ radar; by implementing ´radar interferometry´ the spatial (in depth) structure can be explored. With Polarimetric Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (POL-IN-SAR) imaging, it is possible to recover such co-registered textural and spatial information from POL-IN-SAR digital image data sets simultaneously, including the extraction of Digital Elevation Maps (DEM) from either Polarimetric (scattering matrix) or Interferometric (dual antenna) SAR systems. Simultaneous Polarimetric-plus-Interferometric SAR Imaging offers the additional benefit of obtaining co-registered textural-plus-spatial three-dimensional POL-IN-DEM information, which when applied to Repeat-Pass Image-Overlay Interferometry provides differential background validation and environmental stress-change information with highly improved accuracy. Then, by either designing multiple dual polarization antenna POL-IN-SAR systems or by applying advanced POL-IN-SAR image compression techniques, will result in ´POL-arimetric TOMO-graphic´ (Multi-Interferometric) SAR or POL-TOMO-SAR imaging.